In contrast, Walden Two was not intended as a warning but rather as the antidote to totalitarianism and, more broadly, a practical recipe for the challenges of rebuilding Western societies after the war. Skinner understood his utopia as a methodological cure for the nightmare of crushed souls, a cure that, he insisted, was superior to any of the conventional political, economic, or spiritual remedies on offer. He scoffed at the notion that "democracy" held the solution because it is a political system that merely perpetrates the illusion of freedom while impeding the dominion of science. The promise of the "free market" as the curative for postwar society was an equally empty dream, he believed, because it rewards destructive competitiveness between people and classes. Skinner also rejected existentialism's new humanism, seeing it as a breeding ground for passivity, and he regarded religion as the worst cure of all, enshrining ignorance and crippling the advance of science.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1184