It's a wonderful challenge to us intellectuals - and I don't mean that term pretentiously, but simply as 'someone who enjoys sitting around for big periods of time, thinking about stuff.' I mean, no wonder utopian ideals were such a big part of the early Socialist movement, because Socialism is an intellectual's wet dream - an entire government, spirituality, and way of life based on rational thought, led by those who sit around thinking about stuff the most. Of course, this is the eternal curse of Socialism too, is that these intellectuals spend so much time sitting around arguing about intellectual stuff, nothing ever gets accomplished. Just look at Germany, for example, where a Socialist government was put in place in the years between WWI and WWII (known historically as the 'Weimar Era,' because that's the city where they were based) - you had 16 fucking Constitutions in 13 years, while the country basically fell apart around them, to the point that a forceful guy like Hitler could seize power simply by promising action and then delivering on it.

And I guess that's really the most fascinating thing about utopian societies in a nutshell - that they always sound so damn good on paper, and for the most part work out so damn strange when people attempt to actually implement them. I mean, just take the curious case of Walden II and Los Horcones as a good example, two projects that are not officially related but are intricately linked nonetheless. Walden II is in actuality one of those freaky novel/manifesto hybrids that were so popular between the end of WWII and the death of Kennedy, like when crazy ol' Ayn Rand (God love her!) was publishing Atlas Shrugged and the like; and this one in particular was written by BF Skinner, an early pioneer in the field of Behaviorism. Also known by some as 'operant conditioning,' it's basically a specialty within psychology that attempts to apply scientific principles to human behavior; to theorize, for example, that behavior can be changed through outside action, and that it can be measured and analyzed objectively.

Behaviorism has been the subject of controversy since first invented, and continues to be so; and Skinner certainly didn't make things easier, what with such statements like that free will and dignity are holding humans back from our next stage of evolutionary improvement. Most behaviorists regularly deny it, for example, but critics regularly accuse their community of thinking of humans as programmable robots (or 'black boxes'), able to be manipulated through experiment into 'being' a certain type of person, or behaving in a certain way. And certainly, the Nazis believed this to such an extent that they actually ran all these freaky terror-inducing experiments on prisoners, a practice now known as 'eugenics,' and so that association doesn't exactly help behaviorists quell controversy. And it's true that Skinner proposed and then actually built physical environments were behavior could be studied in a precise scientific way (that is, where you remove all outside stimuli, so that your control measures can be objectively measured), now known as 'Skinner boxes;' some were tame and have become staples of the scientific community, like mazes rats run through in labs, while some were controversial unto themselves, like the freaky stand-up crib/tomb thing he built for his newborn, that regulated temperature and sunlight and all this shit, in an attempt to give her a 'scientifically perfect childhood.'

And so Walden II is both intriguing and controversial as well, because it's all about a utopian society supposedly built that is entirely run on Skinner's behaviorist principles. And with this being a postwar novel/manifesto hybrid, of course, the society runs perfectly, and the book has this Zen-like structure of a newbie touring the grounds, asking questions of his tour guide and getting long expositions about behaviorism back. Ah, the postwar utopian novel/manifesto hybrids - how I love you so! Why doesn't anyone write books like those anymore, huh? It's a great read, to be sure, for the same reason all those hybrids are (as well as Socialist manifestos, for that matter); because it's wonderful to see how such a society would exist in a perfect world, and to see all these perfect delicate little answers that have supposedly been constructed for every possible argument against it. And besides, like Objectivism I think there is a practical purpose to such a thing as well; namely, us realists can actually learn some lessons about the world from such hybrids, and at least partially implement some of the principles in our own lives, no matter how loudly purists howl about such a thing.

But then, see, the '60s and '70s came around, when all those damn hippies first came into being and then into power, and a bunch of old hypothetical utopian societies were dragged out and actually attempted to put into practice. That Wikpedia article links to one of them, a place called Los Horcones in northern Mexico; and this place has actually been in continual existence for over 30 years now and is still operating, so is a particularly interesting one to examine. They're careful to point out at their website that there isn't a direct connection, but in reality the place was designed to be a real-world implementation of Skinner's Walden II; I mean, even their email address starts with "Walden2," and they also run an organization called the "Walden 2 International Society." And what this basically means is communal living - where no one gets individually paid, where no one individually owns any possessions, where the children are raised in group housing away from their parents, where a radical form of government called Personocracy is used to decide affairs. And not only that, but the community serves as a giant Skinner box as well, where a 30-year, continually evolving behaviorist experiment has been taking place, with results recorded and policies changed as deemed fit.

The Los Horcones website is truly one of the more fascinating things in the Heterotopia I've come across in a long time, and I highly recommend anyone with a free afternoon or evening spending some time reading through the mutitidue of pages there. What makes it so fascinating, of course, is to see how the society has had to actually implement itself out in the real world, what has been necessary to change over three decades, and what the long-term results have been of having this supposedly perfect society actually in practice. And in particular there's just this treasure trove of half-mentioned statements and read-between-the-lines comments there about what the project's been like, which of course is yet another thing intellectuals are especially great at. You can tell what's been going wrong there by what they're not talking about that went right, and you can sort of glean this understanding of what it must be like to actually live there, all the joys and headaches mixed together.

Oops, out of space! I'll finish up my thoughts on the subject tomorrow - I still have quite a bit to say, so hold tight.