Some 40 years ago, B.F. Skinner declared that the autonomous man is dead and never existed. His remarks were badly taken by many people who felt that if man was not a creature of free world and simply a prisoner of his own experience and environment that we would be on the slippery slope towards facism. Yet, that alone does not invalidate his argument on how man behaves and interacts with his environment.

If we were to assume that the radical behaviorism as expounded B.F. Skinner is correct then it would suggest that all of man's choices are made choosing the behavior that is most reinforcing in one way or another. Man's experience and environment is complex and we can rarely understand where an individual has been or how sees the world around him. Yet, if we could only control part of the experience or environment, maybe we could control man and his choices.

That would of course ignore the differences in the human mind when it comes to preception. All humans precieve things independent of experience and environment slightly different, and this particularly pronounced in cases of mental illness and autism where there is clear deficitancies in perception of the world. We might be able to control part of the individual but far from totally.

To the political scientist, radical behaviorialism explain a lot of political behavior including class voting behavior. Does the individual actually choose who he votes for in the polling booth or is it predetermined by his experiences generated by social class? It also suggests that if we can penetrate a culture and get our message out then we can radically change how whole groups of people vote.