from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:
Dedication
To Thomas Aikenhead, Edinburgh student hanged in 1697 for blasphemy, who said that religion was “a rhapsody of feigned and ill-invented nonsense” made up of “poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras”. Aikenhead repented under the threat of death, but repentance did not save his life and hanging him did not make anything less poetically nonsensical. His death, the Church which put him to death, and the beliefs he railed against are standard, although extreme, examples of what happens when a cult has power. Today, cultish organizations take our money and freedom while telling us that what they do is not only best for us, but the best there is. Their dominion is inevitable, they contend, because, like the Church in Aikenhead’s time, their supremacy is morally and practically unequalled. The fictions are still poetical and the chimeras extravagant. Aikenhead would understand. To Thomas and those who think things can be done without “poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras”.
I do not pretend to give a blueprint of the developmental stages of a cult or what the specific outline of cult activity will look like. Cults believe themselves to be superior and have methods to recruit, indoctrinate and discipline members. They should be avoided. Government cults are as useless and pernicious as all cults, but are able to intrude themselves via the well-proven method of coercion. With a little thought, they can be avoided and it is recommended that they be. Avoiding their conceptual basis is most important because these bases are based on power and custom, not reality. Examples are education, rehabilitation and economics. Where concepts are not guided by reality, the most nonsensical things occur.
Foreword
When couples are angry at one another, they use the “talking to the dog device”. “Mommy should have listened to Daddy when he told her not to drive so fast. Now the car’s gonna cost $7300 to fix. Mommy should listen.” When an author wants to be cute and annoying, he uses the Martian device. A Martian visits the earth and sees the social sciences in action. He says, “OK. I see the comedy skit. Now where’s the real thing?”
The social sciences puzzling our Martian observer encompass education, rehabilitation of criminals and drug abusers, psychotherapy, and other applications where behavior change is supposedly the common element. Billions of dollars are spent annually on these endeavors. Almost all of this money is wasted.
What prompted me to write this book was the unbridged gap between what works and what is done in the social sciences. In business, knowledge is translated immediately into new and improved products because of the incentives provided by competition. Business is about getting ahead and keeping up. In the majority of instances in the social sciences, such as education and rehabilitation, new methods are constantly being introduced although the new methods are not better than the old. There are many examples of this divide between knowledge and application, and some are on the following pages. I kept looking for a unifying principle as I found more and more relentless inefficiency. Why is the gulf so wide between what is done and what could be done? It then occurred to me that, universal laws of behavior must necessarily be universal. If behavioral principles explain the behavior and learning of clients, the same principles must also explain the behavior of those who run programs. If there is no payoff for success, failure is inevitable and success, accidental. If effectiveness is punished, prevented and\or, not rewarded, effectiveness will not occur. This argument will be developed during the book and summarized in the final chapter. This book follows the formula that you should, “Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, tell ‘em and then, tell ‘em what you’ve told ‘em.”
To those for whom results are not important, data are merely an annoyance. There is no point, therefore, debating those in the public service who have theories about the social sciences. These theories are not based on reality and have no value. One need only to listen to official pronouncements on ending poverty or ending violence or improving education which illustrate the usefulness of not paying attention to these folks. Although they use words and phrases such as “world class”, “innovative”, “cutting edge”, and etc., they can be safely ignored. If your main product is spin, you must use extravagant, empty words.
What I will show is that the largest percentage by far of applications in the social sciences are done under conditions which require, compel and excuse failure. The lack of direct relation between the provider and the client has the same effect as any enterprise with the same relation between outcome and reward: When there are no consequences for the provider, there will be no efficiency in operation. None of the actions of anyone in the social sciences can be understood without knowledge of the contingencies affecting these actions. Although not all important consequences are economic, the lack of economic consequences inevitably results in failure. The same analysis was done by Adam Smith, in 1776. In many ways, Smith developed an evaluation of economic behavior which has survived the centuries and cannot be improved. Some have suggested that "modern complexity" has made Smith’s analyses "outdated" as if the Law of Human Nature depends on the century. His concepts are universal and timeless . Had we paid heed to Smith and acted as he suggested, we would be much better off.
Although I am a libertarian, someone who believes that government intervention should be kept to a minimum, this book is not a political argument and should not be regarded as such. A contingency analysis did not come from libertarianism, although libertarianism may have come from a rudimentary understanding of contingencies. Libertarianism predates the formal and experimental analysis of contingencies by several centuries. The argument in this book is based on well-known effects of contingencies on human behavior. The theory is not new, although its application may be in terms of explaining the failures of the social sciences. The observation applies to Soviet agriculture, public schooling, criminal rehabilitation and the hysteria surrounding “ritual abuse” in the most unlikely places. What I will do in this book is to use effective psychology to explain why most psychology is ineffective.
Some may read this book as the outline of a conspiracy, but there is none. Consistency of failure does not require a conspiracy. Consistency of improper contingencies produces failure inevitably and efficiently without communication among those who fail. This book is the profile of what happens when economic consequences are unrelated to results. It is not an attack on the social sciences, but on those shadow “programs” which are presented as effective in improving lives.
This book has two main points. The first is that there are many successful programs. Several are described in detail. The second is the reason why successful programs are rarely used and\or are not used for very long. It will be much more difficult for most readers to accept the second point than the first. The inefficiency of government is not confined to social sciences programs, but activity in the social sciences is that this book is about.
Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
