Classical Conditioning

#674

Russian scientist, physiologist, physician Ivan Pavlov, famous for his research with dogs, classical conditioning in which he proved that if you ring a bell at a time of feeding dogs, that even when you don't feed the dog, and yet ring the bell, the dog will salivate. One thing never disclosed in the Pavlov experiments; after such conditioning, in the case of severe panic such as a fire or earthquake, the conditioning will be lost.

One of my friends, like many of us, climbing life's ladder as rapidly as possible, hoping the ladder is propped on the right house, always carried home a briefcase full of work. One night his young son asked him why he always brought home so much work from his office. He said, “I have to work very hard and fast in order to provide all the things I want to provide for my family”. His son asked him why his teacher had not put him in a slow class. One night, at his desk in the living room working late hours, having earlier told his wife he felt that he was on the road to their financial security, she asked him if he was ready to go to bed. He said, “you go ahead, I'm going to finish up this work. I feel I am well on the way and it will not always be like this”. During the night she awakened and found that he was not in the bed. She went in the living room, and there he was, still at the desk, his head on the desk. She thought, “he has gone to sleep still at work”. She went over and touched him to awaken him, but he was permanently at sleep.

To the world that does not understand faith, Christianity is nutty. To those in the wold who do not want to excel and succeed, hard work is nutty.

As a student, working in the medical school at UNC-CH, I noticed the same professors were always working in their offices, in the library, in the research labs, late at night. They worked the entire day and most of the night … Their entire philosophy of life was to succeed through research papers, peer reviewed articles in national journals, their name forever written in the pages of academic and medical history.

I remember one, he always wore a bow-tie. One night he lamented to me, “my work is more important than anything else in life now that I have lost my wife and children”. His secretary told me that his wife and children had gone back West to her parents because his work was more important than they. He wanted to heal the entire world but could not recognize the cancer in his own life which was eating away at his own family.

So it is with most of us … At least those of us who are “wired” to succeed. The important thing is to keep everything in perspective. Always, without exception, from my study of the biogrophies of productive people, it is always those “alpha” personalities who have made the discoveries, who have the resilience, the mental drive to keep working in spite of the world, the flesh, the devil. Pitiful the world if all men were just bums, laid back, just taking anything that comes along.

I have known many women, married to men who had the looks, the personality (he is so cute), the popularity to sweep them off their feet and yet after they had lived with him for a while and found his traits of incompetence, knew they were married to a “dud”. The best place for these duds is politics or employment with a company that cuts corners … Either places where integrity and honesty is not an involvement.

In and out of my office, my life, have been big pharmacy representatives … where a 2000% markup is not unusual. You can always tell them, any office, any restaurant … Boisterous, hilarity, never serious about anything, true salesmanship. Lying is as natural as breathing. Most could care less that the poor people going into the doctors office, or the drug store are having to do without food to buy these exorbitantly priced pharmaceuticals. It is like the American entrepreneur retailer of designer clothing. Selling a shirt for $150 which costs just a few pennies from China, China, where most exports are manufactured by slave labor. I know, I have been there three times since the revolution. Huge buildings … Laborers working constantly to turn out export junk.

I know that people will not believe this, you only believe things that you have seen, and it is impossible to even describe such decadence but I have seen Asians weaving the expensive designer clothing you wear and for which you paid a small fortune on machines which were powered by their own legs pumping a mechanism constantly. Much of the sewing is done under tents in almost unbearable weather. I have photographs, throughout Asia, of entire families sitting on the ground, weaving. I was told, that because of the poor lighting and other horrific working conditions, most die or are blind at an early age.

I was reared in the poverty of Eastern North Carolina where tobacco and cotton fields exhibited the same horrendous living standards. Mothers picking cotton by hand, dragging a large bag along the cotton row on which a small child survived … women standing all day long, under a shelter, stringing green tobacco leaves onto sticks for curing. (This picture includes my own mother, grandmother and their children working under these conditions.)

As in Asia, poverty in America is always present if no longer physical, conditioned in the mind. You never get over it. Just as it is difficult to get over the conditioning of life's poverty, it is difficult to get over the conditioning of life's acceptable, indecent behavior.

A gentleman told me recently that he was in the grocery store and at the checkout counter, he noticed that the young woman ahead of him in line, had a scorpion up at the back of her neck. Just as he was about to hit her neck to knock the scorpion off he realized that it was a tattoo. Instead of young people accepting and appreciating the trouble and trials of their ancestors that has given them a better life, they seem to have been conditioned by the Satanic powers always present in world culture to go in the opposite direction.

Until Christ came into the world, women were little more than slaves. In my lifetime, I have seen liberated women try their best to hit bottom … Semi-nakedness, escape from feminine qualities (tattoos, piercings, course language etc.), forsaking motherhood in favor of abortion.
When I was young, divorce was a very rare thing. Now 55% of all marriages end in divorce. The last year for which figures are available, 1999, 700,000 of America's children were in foster homes. In the county in which I live, there are 1200 children in foster homes. Can we even imagine the price America is paying and what God will require for the treatment of these precious, sensitive gifts to the world?

The United Kingdom was the center of the Protestant reformation. Today, more caskets than cradles are used in England … Churches are closed every day. On May 4th, a Baptist street preacher, Dale Mcalpine, was arrested by a homosexual police officer and jailed for handing out leaflets on the street about the evils of the gay lifestyle. Last week, Franklin Graham, evangelist son of Dr. Billy Graham, was dis-invited from this week's National Day or Prayer at the Pentagon, because, after the 9-11 episode he had made statements concerning the Muslim religion.

In another city, a church Christian marriage counselor was arrested for refusing to give marriage advice to a same-sex couple about to get married. Next to black babies (52% of all black babies are aborted), the most endangered person in America is the white, male Christian … Particularly if he is a “TEA Party” participant or white male military veteran. Even the Mayor of New York, and the national news broadcasters are conditioning the American people to suspect white, Christian, male “TEA Party” participants of every suspected terrorist event.

I understand this old, white Christian male, who just happens to be a totally blind, 100% disabled veteran, is on the no-fly list simply because I have traveled around the world several times, have been in most Communist and Muslim countries and have written extensively concerning the horrors of Communism. Probably, I would have not been allowed on the plane in New York. When will America awaken to the conditioning that is taking place … Daily, minute by minute, from the national power brokers who are so anxious for America to become a controlled, collectivist, totalitarian, socialist police state?