Walden Two: some food for thought
Walden Two is B. F. Skinner's venture into book writing. For those outside of psychology, Skinner is a well-known behaviourist, representing the era where psychology went hard-core science (perhaps an overcorrection from previous decades and the inadequacy of introspection). Behaviourists treat the mind like a black box, and expect consistent output with a given static input. The mathematical/engineering equivalent would be a linear time-invariant (LTI) system. While this is a fair assumption for most electronic circuits, it's hopelessly naive for the massive interconnected architecture of the neural network inside our brain.
Still, the behaviourism era wasn't all for nothing. Its most prominent legacy was the concept of conditioning. You may have come across this in pet training or even that of children, where a desired behaviour is paired with a reward, for example. Skinner's favourite of conditioning is called "operant conditioning", and it involves positive/negative reinforcement/punishment. Note the terms positive and negative here refer to the addition or removal of something, respectively, and that something could be either pleasant or unpleasant. Conditioning processes certainly don't explain all human behaviours, but they are a valid piece of the puzzle and a thinking tool frequented by psychologists.
Enough about Skinner and his conditioning. What about his book? In Walden Two, Skinner takes us on a tour of a hypothetical utopia, built heavily upon conditioning principles and behavioural engineering. The thoughts below contain spoilers, so please proceed at your own discretion!
Societal efficiency. From Walden Two's perspective, only a selection of industries are fundamentally productive or useful. These contribute directly to our lives in an easily defined manner: clothing, food (agriculture), accommodation (construction), travel (transport), and their upstream and associated industries. Inefficiencies arise from unnecessary separation or categorisation of services. For example, we often have location A for work, location B for groceries, location C for errands, and location D for entertainment. Similarly, your iPhone comes from over 40 countries and has accumulated enough flight hours to qualify as a first officer before finally flying an ILS approach into your hands. The travel time itself doesn't produce productivity; instead it enables secondary industries that exist to compensate for the primary inefficacy. Inefficiencies also cost us time and reduce output, raise stress and dissatisfaction, again leading to higher demands of secondary compensatory industries (e.g. the entire mental health field, and entertainment industries). As a result, Skinner argues, what could have been a four-hour work day turns into eight-hours, as a significant portion of the population becomes employed in secondary industries and the cost spreads to the entire society. Every one is more overworked, more tired, and more dissatisfied. It's a vicious cycle.
A core achievement of Walden Two's cultural engineering is the removal of personal competition. Skinner argues that fame always comes at the cost of others, and we would all be better off without that software module. Ideally we would never be introduced to it in the first place - Walden Two babies don't know what rivalry is. This fascinates me as I try to envision what that world looks like. Would Walden Two also dispense with ambition, prestige, and recognition? Is contentedness (having our needs met - autonomy, competence, relatedness) really enough to produce motivation? What do you think?
Community childcare is another interesting practice of Walden Two, and it sounds immensely relieving for new mothers. More controversially, Walden Two allows and encourages early marriage and childbearing, with the argument being biological appropriateness. According to Skinner, the adolescent years are uncertain, stressful, and filled with hormones. So why fight against biology when we were meant to have children at that age? But on the other hand, Skinner didn't distinguish between how much of that adolescent uncertainty and stress is inherent (biological), and how much is due to our modern-day lives (social). In either case, the blanket endorsement of early marriage and childbearing is likely too simplistic, but it does offer us some interesting thoughts.
Another interesting perspective is the schooling system of Walden Two: it allows children to learn from experts directly and at their own pace. I couldn't help but feel there's some naïve thinking in Skinner's head again, failing to consider the complexity of reality. But the flexible pacing is an attractive idea, contrasting with the current education system's rigid staging of progression. "One size fits all fits no one", and what's designed for the "average" will fail about a third of children who are one standard deviation away from the mean. Perhaps there is some middle ground between Skinner's free-range education and the rigidly structured one we've got?
Which idea from Walden Two do you find most compelling or most concerning? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.