![]() ![]() Certain radically unusual customs of Walden Two include: children raised communally, families being non-nuclear, free love, and personal expressions of thanks regarded as taboo. The only currency is a simple system of points that buys greater leisure periods in exchange for less desirable forms of work. Members then use their remaining free time to engage in creative, intellectual, or recreational activities of their own choosing, while automatically receiving ample food and sleep. Any labor performed supports the common good and is accompanied by the freedom to select a fresh new place to work each day. Each member is apparently self-motivated, with an amazingly relaxed work schedule of only four average hours of work a day. Except for a small fluctuating group of community Planners (temporarily including Frazier), Walden Two has no real governing body or power to exercise violent force over its citizens. Praising Walden Two's decision-making system for not being authoritarian, anarchic, or even democratic, Frazier argues that Walden Two thus avoids the way that most societies collapse or grow dysfunctional: by remaining dogmatically rigid in their politics and social structure. ![]() Walden Two operates using a flexible design, by continually experimenting with the most successful, evidence-based strategies to organize the community. ![]() A wide range of intellectual topics- behavioral modification, political ethics, educational philosophy, sexual equality (specifically, advocacy for women in the workforce), the common good, historiography, freedom and free will, fascism, American democracy, and Soviet communism-is discussed and often debated among the self-satisfied Frazier, the skeptical and doubting Castle, and the quietly intrigued Burris. The rest of the book proceeds largely as a novel of ideas, mostly involving Frazier, a smug, talkative, and colorful character, guiding his new visitors around Walden Two and proudly explaining its socio-politico-economic structures and collectivist achievements. Venturing to the community, named Walden Two, the young men bring their girlfriends, and Professor Burris brings along his colleague Professor Castle, who teaches philosophy and ethics. Burris contacts Frazier, who invites them all to stay for several days to experience life in the supposedly utopian community. Frazier, who in the 1930s started an intentional community that still thrives. The young men are recent veterans of World War II and, intrigued by utopianism, express interest in an old acquaintance of Burris, named T. The first-person narrator and protagonist, Professor Burris, is a university instructor of psychology, who is approached by two young men (one a former student) sometime in the late 1940s. It embraces the proposition that the behavior of organisms, including humans, is determined by environmental variables, and that systematically altering environmental variables can generate a sociocultural system that very closely approximates utopia. The book is controversial because its characters speak of a rejection of free will, including a rejection of the proposition that human behavior is controlled by a non-corporeal entity, such as a spirit or a soul. ![]() Such methods are now known as applied behavior analysis. At that time, it was considered as science fiction since science-based methods for altering people's behavior did not exist then. Walden Two is a utopian novel written by behavioral psychologist B. ![]()
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