Experimental Communities: Presentation: Walden Two by B. F. Skinner

"Walden Two (1948) is a utopian novel by behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner, describing a small, thousand-person, rural planned community of happy, productive, and creative people. Planners and Managers govern a community requiring only four daily hours of work from each person, and that promotes the arts and applied scientific research. The community subscribe to a code of conduct based upon, and supported by, a behaviourism resembling that of author Skinner.

Walden Two challenges contemporary U.S. social conventions such as the value of modern education, the effectiveness of university professors, excessive work volume, and posits a planned economy, critical of inefficient capitalism. The community's government is not democratic; children are reared communally, outside the nuclear family, and loyalty to community, instead of parents, is encouraged. Childbearing is encouraged as soon as possible, in pursuit of a great growth policy, and eugenics are considered in possibly creating a Golden Age.

Walden Two is controversial for its rejection of democracy as effective government, viable socialist economy, an atheist society, the narrow range of available emotional expression, its appeal to dictators and to emulators of T.E. Frazier, the emotionally unstable protagonist. "

The plot

"Six visitors arrive at a thousand-person community then ten years old. A decade earlier, T.E. Frazier wrote an article asking people join him in founding a community based on philosopher H. D. Thoreau's ideas. Two soldiers, returned from the war, seek Frazier, and enlist Professor Burris's help; he finds and communicates with Frazier, then joins the visit to the community. Prof. Burris invites Prof. Augustine Castle, and, with the two soldiers, Rogers and Steve Jamnick, and their girlfriends, Mary Grove and Barbara Macklin, they visit Walden Two.

The story concerns the arguments among founder Frazier and Prof. Castle and Prof. Burris, which exposit the reasons for the community's structure, its past and its future.At story's end, one couple stay in the community, while the other visitors leave, however, in a sudden change of heart, Prof. Burris quits his university post and returns to the rural community."

Creating a "Walden Two in real life are detailed in Hilke Kuhlmann's Living Walden Two^[10] and in Daniel W. Bjork's B.F.Skinner."

"Some of them include:

1955 In New Haven, Connecticut a group led by Arthur Gladstone tries to start a community.
1966 Waldenwoods conference is held in Hartland, Michigan, comprising 83 adults and 4 children, coordinated through the Breiland list (a list of interested people who wrote to Skinner and were referred to Jim Breiland).
1966 Matthew Israel forms the Association for Social Design(ASD), to promote a Walden Two, which soon finds chapters in Los Angeles, Albuquerque, and Washington, D.C..
1967 Israel's ASD forms the Morningside House in Arlington, Massachusetts.
1967 Twin Oaks Community (web site) is started in Lousia, Virginia.
1969 Keith Miller in Lawrence, Kansas founds a 'Walden house' student collective that becomes The Sunflower House 11.
1971 Roger Ulrich starts Lake Village in Michigan originally conceptualized as a 'scientific behaviorist experiment'.
1971 Los Horcones (web site), is started in Hermosillo, Mexico.
1972 Sunflower House 11 is (re)born in Lawrence, Kansas from the previous experiment.
1979 East Wind in south central Missouri.^[12]
1998 Efforts by Mike Ray of Turlock, California, since 1998 to discuss and plan a community based on Walden Two. See his Walden Two web site."
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