gat

consultancies were beginning to be available in the postwar years, but the total lore of
behaviorism could be learned in about a day, so its embarrassing thinness required fast footwork
to conceal. Being a behaviorist then would hardly have taxed the intellect of a parking lot
attendant; it still doesn’t.
In those days, the U.S. Government was buying heavily into these not-so-secret secrets, as if
anticipating that needy moment scheduled to arrive at the end of the twentieth century when
Richard Barnet of the Institute for Policy Studies would write for Harper’s in a voice freighted
with doom:
The problem is starkly simple. An astonishingly large and increasing number of
human beings are not needed or wanted to make the goods or provide the
services that the paying customers of the world can afford.
In the decades prior to this Malthusian assessment, a whole psychological Institute for Social
Cookery sprang up like a toadstool in the United States to offer recipe books for America’s
future. Even then they knew that 80 percent of the next generation was neither needed nor
wanted. Remedies had to be found to dispose of the menace psychologically.
Skinner had wonderful recipes, better than anyone’s. Not surprisingly, his procedures possessed a
vague familiarity to readers listed in the Blue Book or the Social Register, people whose culture
made them familiar with the training of dogs and falcons. Skinner had recipes for bed wetting, for
interpersonal success, for management of labor, for hugging, for decision-making. His industrial
group prepackaged hypotheses to train anyone for any situation. By 1957, his machines
constituted the psychological technology of choice in institutions with helpless populations:
juvenile detention centers, homes for the retarded, homes for wayward mothers, adoption
agencies, orphan asylums—everywhere the image of childhood was most debased. The pot of
gold at the end of Skinner’s rainbow was School.
Behaviorism’s main psychological rival in 1957 was psychoanalysis, but this rival had lost
momentum by the time big government checks were available to buy psychological services.
There were many demerits against psychoanalysis: its primitive narrative theory, besides sounding
weird, had a desperate time proving anything statistically. Its basic technique required simple data
to be elaborated beyond the bounds of credibility. Even where that was tolerable, it was useless in
a modern school setting built around a simulacrum of precision in labeling.
Social learning theorists, many academic psychiatrists, anthropologists, or other specialists
identified with a university or famous institution like the Mayo Clinic, were behaviorism’s closest
cash competition. But behind the complex exterior webs they wove about social behavior, all
were really behaviorists at heart. Though they spun theory in the mood of Rousseau, the payoff in
each case came down to selling behavioral prescriptions to the policy classes. Their instincts might
lead them into lyrical flights that could link rock falls in the Crab Nebula to the fall of sparrows in
Monongahela, but the bread and butter argument was that mass populations could be and should
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