vii

Foreword

 

In a recent study of the utopias and anti-utopias written during the past century,  ¹Walden Two was singled out as a "methodological utopia." It not only portrayed a way of life that was free of many of the things we object to in the world today, it claimed to show how such a life could be ar­ranged.  I wrote the book in 1945 just as the Second World War was coming to an end.  We had not yet learned the worst about the Nazi regime and the atom bomb had not yet been dropped on Hiroshima, but it was clear that it was time to think about a better world.

 

Eight years earlier I had published another book ² in which I reported some laboratory research (if only with white rats) where, under certain conditions, behavior was fairly precisely control­led.  In that book I refused to consider what control could mean outside the laboratory ("Let him extrapolate who will," I said), but the war had made it clear that extrapolation might be worthwhile.  Something might be done to build a better way of life.

 

Some of the things I thought could be done were these: Children could be raised and educated much more successfully and better prepared for the world in which they would live as adults.  Un­pleasant work could be reduced to a minimum, and work conditions could be made more enjoya­ble.  Personal relations could be improved by reducing the need for possessive and competitive behavior.  There would be much more room for the enjoyable things of life.

 

I have been surprised by how many other advantages now seem to follow from the way of life portrayed in Walden Two.  The community is minimally consuming.  There is very little waste.  The resources of the earth are modestly consumed.  It is a way of life that is minimally polluting.  Although women have babies at an earlier age (I would change that today) there are many fewer reasons to have children (for example, as helpers, as additional sources of income, as support in old age, and so on) and greater opportunities to enjoy children whether or not they are one's own.  A world of Walden Twos would be much less likely to need nuclear weapons.

 

Of course, the design of any way of life raises problems.  For one thing, it suggests an authori­tarian figure who controls everyone's behavior.  I discuss issues of that kind in Walden Two as I discussed them with a group of friends during the war. (One character in the book is close to one of those friends.)

 

Whatever the danger in design, the greater danger is in doing nothing.  Walden Two is a sample of one kind of thing that might be done, and it will be no great loss if its principal effect is to sug­gest other ways.

 

                                                           B. F. Skinner

 

 

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1      Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Oxford: Basil Blackwood,                                   Ltd., 1987

     2     B. F. Skinner, The Behavior of Organisms.  New York, Appleton Century, 1938.