The Real-World Decision Problem
“Why not forever?” said Castle. ‘Why prefer one society to another? What’s wrong with a Tibetan lamasery or an Amish community in Pennsylvania or a monastery in Sicily? If survival is your touchstone, can you choose? I suppose you will argue that some forms are happier than others.”
“Neither happiness nor survival are the deciding factor,” said Frazier. “All the communities you mention might yield the same amount of happiness. But we aren’t satisfied to produce merely a happy people. Our technology is powerful enough to make men happy under many conditions of life.”
“Then how can you possibly decide when you have been successful?” Castle shouted,
“Can’t you see what’s wrong with the indoctrinated communities you’ve just mentioned?” said Frazier. “What’s their most conspicuous characteristic? Isn’t it simply that they don’t change? They’ve been the way they are now for centuries.”
“But if you have a happy life, why change?” said Castle. “Isn’t their permanence the best proof of their success?”
“I’m talking about permanence of another sort” said Frazier. “If these communities have survived, it’s only because the competition hasn’t been keen. It’s obvious to everyone that civilization has left them behind. They haven’t kept up with human progress, and they will eventually fail in fact as they have already failed in principle. Their weakness is proved by their inability to expand in competition with other forms of society. They have fatal defects, and I submit that the defects have not been seen because of overpropagandizing.”
“How can a failure to keep up with civilization be related to propaganda?” I said.
“It’s directly related,” said Frazier. “Nothing could be more direct. It’s directly related in this way: in order to make such a culture acceptable it’s necessary to suppress some of the most powerful human emotions and motives. Intellect is stultified or diverted into hypnotic meditations, ritualistic incantations, et cetera. The basic needs are sublimated. False needs are created to absorb the energies. Look at India. Do you need any clearer proof of the tradeoff between propaganda and progress? What we are trying to achieve through our cultural experiments in Walden Two is a way of life which will be satisfying without propaganda and for which, therefore, we won’t have to pay the price of personal stultification. Happiness is our first goal, but an alert and active drive toward the future is our second. We’ll settle for the degree of happiness which has been achieved in other communities or cultures, but we’ll be satisfied with nothing short of the most alert and active group-intelligence yet to appear on the face of the earth,”
B.F. Skinner, 1948. Walden Two (Hackett Classics) (pp. 193-194).
