Walden Two: Electric Boogaloo
There’s a very justifiable stereotype about academics that they live in elitist ivory towers, turning the rest of the world into variables to be studied and eventually controlled.
However, some of the most influential academics are often motivated by manifesting a worldview rather than just building a successful career. Francis Bacon was motivated to study the laws of the natural world as the laws of God, meant to be unpacked to be appreciated. Einstein presented defenses of socialist projects with critiques of the evidence generated by economics researchers. In his novels, Stephen Hawking would describe the Theory of Everything with an almost spiritual commitment to finding answers from the universe.
BF Skinner wrote Walden Two in the context to describe a world in which operant conditioning was accepted as a basic building block for the design of social systems. He argues through a fictional utopia that, with the right combination of incentives, a community could be fundamentally cooperative, peaceful, and leisurely. The society would be decentralized
To be continued.