Skinner was eager to apply his laboratory insights to the world's ills despite precious few grounds for his inferential leaps. As a public intellectual, he spent nearly seven decades trying to persuade the public that his radical behaviorism offered the principles of social organization necessary to defend civilization from cataclysm. He brashly extrapolated from the conduct of beleaguered animals to grand theories of social behavior and human evolution in books such as his 1948 "utopian" novel Walden Two and his 1971 social philosophy Beyond Freedom & Dignity.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1147