Walden Two

2 Timothy 3, verse 7. ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.

Daniel 12.4, But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, even to the time of the end.

Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.

I want you to think about that.

So we will not be doing a podcast on that Friday, obviously.

And if you are coming to the camp meeting and if you can't remember anything else, just keep this in your mind.

We're meeting at the bookstore Friday, September 25th.

Everything starts at noon.

It's amazing that the same director was willing to make a comically Americanized Hollywood version a few years later, but the original is awesome.

Dave, my heart jumped when I heard you mention B.F. Skinner's Walden 2.

I've never heard anyone outside my family refer to that book, but my father used that as a text for his anthropology courses in the 1980s, along with Ursula Le Guin's sci-fi masterpiece The Dispossessed.

Walden, too, is not nearly as good in my view because it doesn't really reckon with the flaws and vulnerabilities of his utopia, and it fundamentally fails to recognize that human beings have inborn traits and tendencies and aren't just blank slate products of their environment.

So if you change the environment, then you change the person also.

He wrote a book called Walden Two, and it was where he imagined a society engineered so carefully that competition itself would just disappear, that there would be no jealousy, no greed, no political ambition, just cooperation, at least in theory.

And then, of course, reality showed up one day, and that is where this Twin Oaks story gets really great and fascinating.

Now, Twin Oaks was a little town that was founded based on and to build on Skinner's vision.