hLet’s talk a little about utopias today. Let’s say to begin with that although the term “utopia” is sometimes used generically to refer to any ideal or project of a person, it has a much more precise meaning. The term was coined in the 16th century by Thomas More, who in the book of the same name describes an idyllic society located on the island of Utopia. With the passage of time, “utopia” came to be used to designate all kinds of ideal societies or societies with very desirable characteristics, from Republic from Plato to Men like Gods of Wells, going through dozens of similar examples. Usually utopias are literary or philosophical fictions, but in some cases they have become realities. It is about the deliberate organization of a community that allows living conditions that are denied or hindered in traditional civilization. They are almost always small and relatively remote communities, such as the one in Costa Rica (which offers the curiosity of having been designed inspired by the village of the Ewoks of Star Wars), or in Australia, among others. Are They are organized according to various principles: some have a more ecological intention, others have more religious intentions (such as the well-known case of the Quakers in the United States, which I met as a child thanks to Quaker Oatmeal), or simply seeking better quality. of life. By now you’re probably wondering what the hell I’m doing writing about utopias on a psychology website. It happens that there have been a number of communities that have been designed guided by certain psychological developments. Psychology as a guide for a community.
Walden Two
In 1948, the well-known psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner published a book called “Walden Two”. Altus and Morris (2009) describe the birth of the book like this:
“The name was a tribute to the poet Henry David Thoreau’s work Walden or Life in the Woods, in which he narrates his experiences and observations living in contact with nature and away from industrialized society. Like Thoreau, Skinner was also upset with many aspects of the American way of life. He wrote: “He had seen my wife and her friends struggling to save themselves from domesticity, grimacing at having to write ‘housewife’ on job applications. Our daughter had finished first grade, and there is nothing like a firstborn’s first year of school to start thinking about education” (Altus & Morris, 2009).
The fictional community described by Skinner fosters free affection, the communal upbringing of children, non-nuclear families, and a rather peculiar form of self-government.
In Walden Two, Skinner describes a fictitious community, organized according to the principles proposed by behavior analysis: a community that encourages cooperation, avoiding dogmatism and with an experimental attitude towards everything, flexibly testing the strategies that best adapt to development. of the community.
The fictional community described by Skinner fosters free affection, the communal upbringing of children, non-nuclear families, and a rather peculiar form of self-government, among other points. As Frazier, one of the main characters, states: “The technique achieved is almost perfect. The important thing is to encourage our people to consider each habit and custom as susceptible to improvement. A constant experimental attitude toward everything… that’s what we need” (Skinner, 1968). The book was published in 1948, and while it was Skinner’s first approach to social and humanist problems, it was certainly not his last – a good portion of his work has been dedicated to exploring social and organizational issues. Walden Two had a mixed reception, as it could not be otherwise. Skinner’s ideas are controversial even today, and let us remember that Skinner’s first book (The behavior of organisms) had been published only 10 years earlier (when Skinner was 34 years old…) so most of his ideas were relatively unknown to the general public and the book had its share of detractors.
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From novel to real life
Walden Two had, however, a rather atypical fate for books about utopias: there were several initiatives that attempted to develop communities based explicitly on its principles. More than one intentional community has been created following more or less closely and more or less explicitly the example of Walden Two. This is how communities were created such as or , in the USA, or in Barcelona, a building roughly based on Skinner’s book, among other projects.
The community was officially founded in 1973 a few kilometers from the city of Hermosillo, in Mexico.
It is an intentional community located on a 100-hectare plot of land in the Sonoran Desert in which there are around 30 buildings (kitchen, dining room, offices, study center, libraries, laundry, workshops, buildings for private use and for visits), as well as areas for raising animals and orchards. However, it is necessary to go back a few years to find the first sketches of what would become Los Horcones. In the words of the community: “In 1971 the founders started a center for children with special needs, particularly children on the autism spectrum. and Down syndrome. The intervention used the (ACA), which at that time was just beginning. After a while of working with the students, they verified how effective it was to behaviorally organize the educational environment as well as the interactions when working with them. This made them reflect, “if students learned behaviors with the ACA intervention that were impossible to learn with the traditional method, couldn’t we organize our social environment and cultural practices to reinforce appropriate behaviors?”
From that moment the community began to take shape. However, like the other Walden Two-type communities, it should not be thought of as a carbon copy of the one described in the novel, since it has not been based on the specific practices that Skinner describes in his novel but rather the scientific spirit of the itself – after all, Skinner wrote his book in 1945, in a social and scientific context that would change over time. Los Horcones Community –refer from the community– “It is a pilot project for society where we use science and its procedures, especially the science of behavior, behaviorology, for the design and implementation of cultural practices that positively reinforce behaviors that help us have a better future.” It is, then, “the use of science, especially behavioral science, for the organization, prevention and solution of any problem.” It is then a experimental culture, in which scientific principles in general and behavioral principles in particular are used to discover and promote cultural practices (behaviors, habits, customs) that are positive for the community and its environment. Consistent with this scientific orientation, Los Horcones has made a number of publications in scientific journals, as a collective author (for example, see Comunidad Los Horcones, 1986a, 1986b, 1987, 1991) – which seems to be a custom of the community, since who in fact have also collectively responded to our questions for this article. At some point, this habit of publishing is consistent with the scientific orientation of the community: “We consider that scientific discoveries should be shared beyond the scientific community that produces them,” they stated in an article published in the Latin American Journal of Psychology ago. some decades (Los Horcones Community, 1990). This experimental culture is manifested, for example, in the successive forms of government that have been implemented in the community. Initially, the system was glider-handlers, something similar to what Skinner proposed in his novel. Since the system presented some difficulties, after four years it moved to a form of direct democracy, which also generated problems in the community (most notably, conflicts and deteriorations in cooperation), so a form of government was designed that they called personocracy (Los Horcones Community, 1990), a form of government “concerned with referring to specific individuals, considering them as the key to the progress of society. Thus, the decisions made are not legitimized in the deliberations of an abstract majority, as happens in democracy. In concrete terms, this means that political measures rejected by the majority can be implemented, if they are experimentally proven, which requires a long process of search and collective cooperation” (Ferreira, Machado, & Hautequestt, 2009).
It is a pilot project for society where we use behavioral science to design and implement cultural practices that positively reinforce behaviors that help us have a better future.
The application and functioning of this experimental culture is favored by the fact that it is a small community – it would be much more complicated to apply such a government with a population of several million people, which is why the limitation of the number of members has also been a constant in the design and application of utopias. In the case of the Los Horcones Community, the number of members has varied over the years, but although about 20 children have been born and lived throughout its operation, it has always been a relatively small community:“ Currently we are 4 adults and two children who live full time in the community. Seasonally it reaches 8-10 people. But the behavioral intervention center founded in 1971 still continues and is an active part of Los Horcones. We have approximately 10-12 children and young people with whom we work, and 7 more people, including psychologists, physical educators and therapists, who help us with the center’s activities.”
Like the government, the economy is run cooperatively. The economic model is described (although we have not been able to confirm that it is still in force in the same way) as a Walden Cooperative Economy, which consists of the following characteristics: cooperation in the production of goods and services; the equitable distribution of goods and services; the rational consumption of goods and services; all income goes to a common fund; It is not monetary, within the community; maintains monetary relations with the outside society; seeks the natural reinforcement (intrinsic satisfaction) of the members in…