Another factor was the 1971 publication of B. F. Skinner’s incendiary social meditation Beyond Freedom & Dignity. Skinner prescribed a future based on behavioral control, rejecting the very idea of freedom (as well as every tenet of a liberal society) and cast the notion of human dignity as an accident of self-serving narcissism. Skinner imagined a pervasive “technology of behavior” that would one day enable the application of behavior-modification methods across entire human populations.
