Word: skinnerism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Aldous Huxley to Agatha Christie, carries considerable fascination. What if a pill had been available to soothe Genghis Khan or Alexander, or bend Adolph Hitler's mind to some charitable humanity? Clark's proposal is an extraordinarily dramatic extension of the argument made by Behavioral Psychologist B.F. Skinner (see cover story) that man must be controlled to survive...
...Skinner's Walden...
...speaker is T.E. Frazier, a character in Walden Two and the fictional founder of the Utopian community described in that novel. He is also an alter ego of the author, Burrhus Frederic Skinner, who is both a psychology professor and an institution at Harvard. Skinner is the most influential of living American psychologists, and the most controversial contemporary figure in the science of human behavior, adored as a messiah and abhorred as a menace. As leader of the "behavioristic" psychologists, who liken man to a machine, Skinner is vigorously opposed both by humanists and by Freudian psychoanalysts. Next week that...
Like the Utopians who preceded him, Skinner hopes for a society in which men of good will can work, love and live in security and in harmony. For mankind he wants enough to eat, a clean environment, and safety from nuclear cataclysm. He longs for a worldwide culture based on the principles of his famous didactic novel, Walden Two. Those principles include: communal ownership of land and buildings, egalitarian relationships between men and women, devotion to art, music and literature, liberal rewards for constructive behavior, freedom from jealousy, gossip, and?astonishingly?from the ideal of freedom. Beyond Freedom and Dignity...
...Skinner acknowledges that the concept of freedom played a vital role in man's successful efforts to overthrow the tyrants who oppressed him, bolstering his courage and spurring him to nearly superhuman effort. But the same ideal, Skinner maintains, now threatens 20th century man's continued existence. "My book,'' says Skinner, ''is an effort to demonstrate how things go bad when you make a fetish out of individual freedom and dignity. If you insist that individual rights are the summum bonum, then the whole structure of society falls down." In fact, Skinner believes that Western culture...