Adam Levin - Hot Pink

At the start of the instructional portion of meeting number thirty, the therapist maniacally flipped through the tear-away pad and said, “This evening, I’m going to let you in on the secret to everything.” He stepped aside and pointed to the pad, on which was written:

JAKE: Actually, I do feel a little bit insulted. In fact, very insulted.

BEN: That’s pretty effing ridiculous!

Sally raised her hand and held it in the air to get the therapist’s attention. The therapist didn’t call on her. Sally’s hand stayed elevated until the first time he used the word constancy .

According to Skinner, the way to extinguish an undesirable behavior is to stop reinforcing it.

The therapist said, “People act in order to make the world predictable. To maintain constancy. To keep to the simplest and most readable patterns. People don’t move toward what we often call pleasure . They often do not move in the direction of what is best for them. It’s constancy.” Here, the therapist paused to take a sip from a styrofoam cup of water.

Sally’s hand shot up into the air again, and she waved it back and forth until the therapist said the word whom . Skinner found that before a behavior became extinct, it would increase in either frequency or intensity or both. Take a pigeon conditioned with food pellets to lift its left wing and peck the bolt on the door of its cage. If you stop reinforcing it with food pellets, you eventually extinguish the wing-lifting, bolt-pecking behavior. Before the behavior becomes extinct, though, the pigeon will frantically wing-lift and/or bolt-peck.

The therapist said, “Evidence? How about something extreme? How about take a look at the children of abusive parents. Is being sexually molested what’s best for them? Is being beaten something they enjoy? Come on. Of course not. Nonetheless, when we try to get them away from their abusive parents, they cling. They don’t want to go, guys. They want to stay with their abusers. Why? I’ll tell you why: constancy. Predictability. A world in which they know when and by whom they’ll get beaten and sexually molested is less scary to them than a world in which they have no idea about what could happen next.” His face smiled. He took a breath.

Sally raised her hand again and waved it furiously, along with her head. Some of her hair came out of its barrette. She started tapping her foot and the thing was this: it doesn’t matter what kind of pigeon it is. It doesn’t matter if the pigeon has a soul or not. It doesn’t matter if I love the pigeon or if the pigeon loves me. If I give it food for pecking the bolt with its wing up, it will peck the bolt with its wing up. If I quit giving it food, it will eventually quit pecking the bolt with its wing up. It doesn’t matter if it knows why it has stopped pecking the bolt with its wing up or if it knows why it ever started pecking the bolt with its wing up. And once it stops, I can get it to start again by conditioning it with food pellets.

“They act to stay with their abusers, these kids. Because why? Because constancy. Constancy constancy constancy. Constancy is based on experience. Without constancy, we fear that the foundations of our individual worlds could crumble. Without constancy we face the unknown. So we repeat. We pattern. To maintain constancy.

“How can we apply this knowledge? Well, judging by the interaction between Jake and Ben that we see here on the tear-away pad, I would guess that Ben comes from a background in which honest statements of feelings, e.g.”—the therapist pointed to the tear-away pad—“‘I do feel insulted,’ have been regularly met with abject cruelty. What does this mean to Ben? This means that if Ben had not acted in an abjectly cruel manner when he responded to Jake’s honest statement of feelings, Ben’s world could have crumbled! Or so Ben would think. Of course it’s not true. That’s the good news. That’s the miracle. It wouldn’t have crumbled! Can you see that, Ben? Of course you can’t. Not yet. But that’s why we’re all here.”

The therapist’s eyebrows climbed to his hairline and he panned his expectant gaze across the six of us. Sally dropped her hand in her lap and left it there.

The troubling thing, for me, about Skinner was this: while the behaviorist is shaping the behavior of his pigeon, the pigeon is shaping the behavior of its behaviorist. Place two video cameras in the lab: one over the shoulder of the behaviorist outside the cage, and one inside the cage over the shoulder of the pigeon. On the first screen you’ll see a pigeon doing tricks for food, and on the second a man doling food out for tricks. For the pigeon to receive food, it has to do a trick, that’s true, but for the man to receive a trick, he has to dole out food — that’s equally true. Granted, there’s a cage, and the cage is the man’s — he controls the condition called “cage”—so you can accurately see that the behavior of the pigeon is under the man’s influence to a much greater degree than the man’s behavior is under the pigeon’s. That’s all in a lab between a man and a bird, though. In the larger world, between human beings, it isn’t so easy to know whose cage you’re in, or who’s in yours. It’s hard enough to determine which side of the bars you’re on. Maybe you don’t even see the bars.

Jake raised his hand.

“Jake?” said the therapist.

“I have something to say to Ben,” Jake said to the therapist. “I’m not very patient,” he said to me. “When we first met, I should have been more compassionate. I wasn’t trying to foul up your constancy, Ben. I was trying to maintain my own. I guess I just get insulted when people walk out of meetings like that girl did.”

“Well-said,” said the therapist. “Ben?”

I said, “That’s ridiculous.”

The therapist pointed at the tear-away pad and made some noise. He made the noise “But constancy.” He made the noise “And the good news.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said.

And the therapist pointed at the tear-away pad and made some more noise. He made the noise “But constancy. Constancy.” Then he made the noise “And the good news and the good news,” and I made the noise “Ridiculous.”

We kept going like that for a while, until I felt cruel or exhausted or beaten or trapped or guilty and I made the noise “Constancy.”

“Well said,” said the therapist.

I didn’t know whether Tell would quit getting Ricked if I quit having sex with her after she’d been Ricked, but I knew that she would continue getting Ricked if I continued having sex with her after she’d been Ricked. And I continued having sex with her after she’d been Ricked, and as the summer began to come to an end, I started to wonder if I had it all reversed, if it wasn’t so much that she continued getting Ricked because I continued having sex with her as that I continued having sex with her because she continued getting Ricked. And I started to wonder about every guy I saw. The guys I washed windows with. The fools in the group. The therapist himself. Guys on television. Koppel. Jerry Seinfeld. Ricks? All of them? It was possible. And then it was women I wondered about. Not just which ones were Tells — if there were any other ones — but if they thought I was a Steve. I was pretty sure they didn’t think I was a Rick. I didn’t know what Tell thought. and I was scared to find out and certain that I wouldn’t trust her answer if I asked her; she’d say whatever she thought would hurt me least. And what would hurt me least? I didn’t know that either. I didn’t completely understand the terms. I’d assumed for awhile that there was a continuum: Ricks at one extreme, Steves at the other, me somewhere in the middle. But maybe there were just Ricks and Steves and then an entirely different scale for everyone else. Then again, maybe Ricks and Steves weren’t mutually exclusive: maybe certain Steves were also Ricks in certain contexts, and certain Ricks Steves. Were Steves just Ricks who were too afraid to Rick? Was that the only difference? Was I just too afraid? I kept on fucking her after she’d been Ricked, and kept on thinking I shouldn’t keep fucking her. Was that the way of a Steve or a Rick? I didn’t know what I was made of.