Jennifer Schottstädt
PSYCH 121H
Behaviorism: Walden
Two by B.F. Skinner
Castle
closed the book deliberately and set it aside.
He had purposefully waited half a decade to read Walden Two after its initial publication, because, years after
parting from Frazier and his despotic utopia, he could not shake the perturbation
the community inspired. But, eight years
later, he had grown even more frustrated with himself at his apparent inability
to look at the situation calmly. In a fit
of willfulness, he had pulled the unopened volume from its top shelf, and now
he was hoping that that had been a good idea.
His daily temperament, to say the least, had suffered from his continual
aggravation. Something had to be done
about this.
As
an experiment, he guessed, Walden Two was a success. He himself had seen the happy community and
clearly remembered the horrid time he had had debunking it. It was certainly harder to criticize Walden
Two than it was to debunk democracy and the outside society; Frazier had made
sure to drive that point home. The
inhabitants were clearly at peace, and he was struck by the story Burris told
of the woman who sat in a chair, enjoying her rest and
carefully not looking at her own garden.
He hadn’t known that Burris’s doubts were so strong that he had to make
his own observations. Castle’s mostly
academic mind approved heartily.
He
supposed the woman was happy. She was obviously too old to be a
second-generation Walden Two inmate, and so had not been subtly forced to be
unselfish and content. She willingly
subscribed to the Code and accepted the rules that told her not to gossip, to
refrain from gratitude, and not to admire her own flowers. She led a placid, comfortable life and he
supposed that most elderly people, having reached the end of their lives,
wanted nothing more. He knew men who
avidly looked forward to their retirement just to have the freedom—or
slavery—of doing nothing. Walden Two, with
its relaxed atmosphere and inspiring artistic and intellectual communities,
would be a marvelous stimulant and medicine for those so jaded to life as to
simply want to be peaceful.
He
supposed Steve and Mary were happy, too.
They had wanted to enter Walden Two because—and even he could see
this—it was easier and would make them far happier than their past life could. Frowning, he tried to picture Mary’s face and
failed. Any mind destined for
middle-class struggles would naturally gravitate to such an easy, planned
society. Steve and Mary were not geniuses,
and they did not seek excellence.
Undoubtedly they had had several offspring by now and frequently took
other children on picnics. Burris, too,
with his idealization and his apparent desire for the best possible world, was
at peace with his writing and his daily labor-credits. And Frazier—Frazier! Frazier was probably happiest of them
all. Reading his
unapologetic, arrogant comparisons to God made Castle writhe in his seat. No matter that Castle was teetering on the
edge of atheism; it made his intestines thrash to think of this string-puller
considering himself the greatest man that had ever
lived and a person worthy of divine worship.
It was revolting.
He
wished he hadn’t known how badly Burris thought of his convictions. Castle sat for awhile, brooding, glaring at
the inoffensive white book. If it had
been a woman, he thought furiously, she would probably be blinking sweetly up
at him after throwing coffee on his books.
He hated that book, and it wouldn’t leave him alone.
The
most frustrating thing was that Walden Two would undoubtedly appeal to the
majority of the world. For most people,
it looked like the ideal life they would be fools to waste. And then? What would happen after Walden Innumerables
absorbed the entire globe? What about
the rest of society, those people who could not be happy with tranquility? Frazier might have designed a world for a
people engineered to love calm happiness, but he himself was proof that this
idyllic community was not for all. Could
Frazier have been happy as a mere inhabitant instead of the designer?
No
matter what Frazier said about his own brilliance, Castle refused to believe
that Frazier was the only one of his kind.
Somewhere among six billion minds were thousands like Frazier’s, and
they would not be content with just existing.
Yes, the man might be able to dominate all future generations, but to do
so, he would have to absorb the millions of mindsets of the entire world into a
Walden Two style of belief so they would surrender their children, and sooner
or later, someone would erupt. Someone
as arrogant as Frazier and as stubborn as himself would find a way to overthrow
or corrupt Walden Two, Castle had no doubt of it. Frazier could not control the world.
He
began to think, and then he thought furiously.
There were gaping flaws in Walden Two that Frazier, out of inexperience,
had completely overlooked. He
underestimated the emotional value of childbirth, for one thing. It seemed that he had never heard of women
who gave birth ready to give the baby up for adoption and who then fell madly
in love with their children once they saw and held them. It was mad to think that all women would be
satisfied with seeing their children occasionally and never being allowed to
single them out. Did he know nothing of
motherhood? Did he allow for spontaneous
outbursts of emotion?—no, on the contrary.
In
Walden Two, passion was not an acceptable level of emotion. Passionate affairs apparently did not exist,
since people so often kept to their marriages, although passionate marriages
were also practically extinct, as couples could prefer separate rooms after
only a couple of years. Come to that,
Castle thought, the most beautiful moments in life could not be appreciated in
Walden Two, because everything good anyone did or experienced was taken for
granted. Say what Frazier might, a sharp
welling of gratitude was a more powerful emotion and influence than placid,
accepted happiness.
Walden
Two was so bland, so obsessively
focused on happiness that it left out the one thing that truly makes
joy—unhappiness. The inhabitants did not
even know if they were happy or not—they could barely define the word! They could admit to being well-fed and
relaxed, but not one of them, in his experience or in Burris’ book, was ever
painfully happy. Frazier wanted to
eliminate pain and, in doing so, eliminated the very thing that made happiness
the fulfilling pinnacle that it can be.
Each of his memorable, blissful life experiences would mean nothing in
Walden Two, because there everything was automatically on the same level of
constant happiness.
Walden
Two was memorable as a community, not for its individuals. Its people were a mass of subjects, and
Frazier did not admit that there were people who could not be made to
conform. Schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s
were medical problems that could not be ignored and they threw the idea of
“nurture, not nature” on which Frazier’s concepts rested, entirely
off-balance. Behaviorism could not
control every single aspect of life; that would be like trying to teach someone
with no right arm to knit using his hands.
And Castle knew that if he could resent being treated as part of a unit
instead of a unique individual, millions of others would, too.
Feeling
a savage flood of perhaps incomplete triumph, Castle practically threw the book
back onto its shelf. He, for one,
refused to give in to Frazier.