But that's not really what I'm going to write about here. There's a certain level, near the end of Bioshock, where you have to impersonate a Big Daddy. That's a big guy who wears an ancient steel diving suit and for some reason(probably to kill you), has a giant drill on his arm. Anyway, you need to disguise yourself as one to trick a little girl into helping you.
Make sense? Probably not, unless you know how Bioshock works. Well basically, in the game, there are a bunch of little girls who walk around the city and extract genetic material from corpses. They're "possessed" by a parasitic slug, and are guarded by a Big Daddy during their "adventures".
Anyway, in the training facility for these little girls, there's a room that has two pictures. One has a woman on it, and the other a big guy in a steel diving suit. When you push the button under the woman's picture, you receive an electric shock. When you push the button at the diving suit dude's picture, a candy bar falls out.
Conditioning. Reward when they do something you want, punish when they do something you don't want. Over time, it becomes ingrained into their minds. It becomes natural instinct. In the example, the little girls will learn that women(mommies) are bad, and following a Big Daddy around will earn rewards. It's so crude, yet so effective. It's comparable to the experiments of real-life animal behaviorologists. Or animal trainers.
Since it already happens with animals(and it's very effective), it's not out of context to say that it may also happen to humans. I'm pretty sure that it's been done before, though not to very extreme cases. In fact, whenever your mom thwacks you after you've done something "wrong", you're experiencing behaviorable conditioning(something tells me that's not a real term). They call it "discipline", and if executed correctly and at appropriate times, actually benefits humans as a whole. Unfortunately, not everyone is that good at it.
My point is, that while it occurs domestically, it could also occur on a massive, industrial scale. Let's just throw the constraints of reality out of the window for a second, and consider an alien invasion.
And we can't nuke them. For no reason at all, the best and only way to counter the aliens is by melee(what's the American spelling!?) combat. Now, we need every last man to get in there and fight, but we know that not everyone is going to comply. That's why we resort to artificial conditioning. This war is going to last very long, so a new policy comes out. All male newborns are to be sent to a conditioning centre for training. There, they will know no family, nothing normal. Their only purpose in life would be to get sent into that alien war and fight for the human race. When they grow up, they might as well be machines, conditioned only to follow orders.
Okay, there we go. An insight into my crazy and diabolical mind.
I'm just saying, the behavioral conditioning could lead to the enslavement of the human race... again. Yes, I know, I think about it too much.
*Okay damn. I can't fine the picture I wanted to upload today. I really need to organise my folder.
So here's a completely unrelated picture for the day:
I actually find it funny.
-Joe