SOCIAL CONDITIONING
People talk a lot about it, but in several discussions, it turned out that many people don’t know much about the exact meaning of it. Some people pretend to know what it means so that they don’t need to admit they don’t.
Conditioning means that we react, i.e. respond, to a specific stimulus from outside with a particular behaviour. (Like Pavlov’s dog, if you’ve heard of it.) The word social refers to the fact that our behaviour is manipulated regarding social interaction, means we are trained.
Of course, this conditioning serves an illustrative purpose. Its meaning is to keep us and our behaviour within our clan rules. Parents and clan members train their children to grow up unscathed and to behave appropriately to their customs.
The most promising sanctions for conditioning - that is, for guiding our behaviour - are emotions. By addressing them, specific actions can be reinforced, and others suppressed. While perceiving positive reinforcement as pleasant, negative moderation makes us feel bad.
What is so fatal about social conditioning for us is that it works very efficiently with the emotions of fear, shame and guilt. These emotions are very unpleasant for us humans and therefore have extraordinary power. They keep us within the social fabric of our clan very efficiently.
Suppose at the beginning of our lives, we imperatively need our group’s protection, which ensures our bare survival. Later on, as we grow older this dependency fades more and more, without, however, at the same time discarding the adapted reactions of fear, shame and guilt, once used as a remedy for specific “misbehaviour”. Even as adults, we continue to feel guilty if we behave contrary to our family’s rules, even though we do not agree with them at all and our survival has long since ceased to depend on them. We are still ashamed of things we must not be ashamed of at all only because we were fiercely put in our place as a child and tainted with shame, which must have long since ceased to be valid for us as adults. Unnecessarily, we simulate our scope of action based on our childish conditioning. And not only our childhood conditioning. We are susceptible to being conditioned our whole lives.
Social media is conditioning in its purest form: We post something on Instagram, usually get immediate feedback that shows us how much we match the group’s rules and norms. The only difference is that our clan no longer consists of saying 20 people, but of hundreds, even thousands, who all give us feedback on our “performance” within instants. They all condition us. Because when we get positive feedback, i.e. our behaviour is positively reinforced, we gradually adjust our future behaviour to get even more positive feedback. We trim ourselves, so to speak, to fit into the grid of the group of people, some of whom we don’t even know personally.
As positive as it may sound, this feedback culture leads us to lose touch with ourselves completely. What do we want ourselves - if we don’t have to expect any judgement. Who are we deep down within? What is important to us? Where are our longings? Our desires? Our identity? What is unique about us that only we have? Have we already trained ourselves to forget it because we don’t get the likes we were hoping for? Or don’t we know ourselves because we are more concerned with following the group’s ideal than our own?
Social conditioning might have its justification in childhood and part of teenage, but certainly not in adulthood. It keeps us from living according to our own values and thus in harmony with our innermost being. It makes us dependent. As children and teenager, we are indeed dependent. Still, as adults, it is our life-task to free ourselves not only from the conditioning of our family but also from the conditioning of every other people. Only like that, we can live a self-determined life according to our own values honestly and genuinely be happy.