In a previous article I outlined the structure for The Society of Phred. Lately I have been acting both as a port and as a node at the same time in an attempt to begin local SOP nodes. One recent conversation helped solidify one of the primary problems facing the Society of Phred. The conditioning produced by the Skinner Box of Society not only controls our physical behavior, but also our mental thought structure.

I have always thought the death penalty was wrong. If it is wrong for an individual to kill another, then it is just as wrong for a group to kill an individual. Our society uses 12 individuals, forcing them to decide if the law has been broken. The legal system separates this decision from the actual punishment so neither guilt nor responsibility can be attatched to any one individual. I believe the evil resides in this system of justice, not in the individuals performing these actions. I was recently describing to a friend how my understanding of this evil went beyond the death penalty, to all other crimes, most of which involve some sort of theft. I have come to understand that it is just as evil to take a man’s freedom for such a crime. After some rousing discourse I finally realized that our difference in point of view was unresolvable. He believes that the evil resides in the individual, not the system that creates individuals who can kill others. That belief is founded in his social conditioning, conditioning that his rational mind can not see past.

I am convinced by this discussion that the conditioning society imposes on its participants does much more than control their physical behavior. This conditioning reaches deep into our minds, controlling our point of view about good and evil, among many other things. I have always used logic to decide on the correctness of any action. It has been an application of logic that has allowed me to see past at least some of my conditioning. I know that I am conditioned in other ways that I can not control with logic. Freeing myself of this conditioning is a goal that I am no where near accomplishing. I believe that without the help of the Society of Phred that this task may be impossible. More to the point, it really doesn’t matter if I manage to free myself if I can’t free others as well.

My friends point of view about where evil resides appears mostly to be founded in his religious training. This meme declares itself to be unassailable truth, a truth that rejects logic as a decision mechanism. This is going to be the hardest conditioning to break, but there are others just as difficult to unravel as this one.

One thing is certain. The conditioning can not be broken from the outside. The process of breaking this conditioning must come from inside first. There may be ways for others to help the process along, maybe even provide the necessary triggers that break such conditioning. There must be a bootstrap process that allows the individual to gain their freedom from all conditioning. While such freedoms will be difficult to exercise in todays societies, with enough free individuals, the destructive path that our societies have us on may be diverted to something more protective of the individual. My hope is that SOP can find a solution that can free us all.