Re: M.I.T. and Altruism?

[Magic Circ Op Rep Ens]

Your comments remind me of Twain's The Corruption of Hadleyburg but that has nothing to do with Mastery, Senge or Perlman as I was pointing out.      I don't understand why a Future of Work list runs so quickly away from the issues of quality and mastery.     Intellectual Capital is raping the old views regularly.   From Agile manufacturing to Handy's Stakeholders, the old views just don't suffice and it doesn't matter what 19th century philosopher we quote.     Economics acts as if it had Alien Hand Syndrome with a sliced corpus collosum and both sides doing war while we all starve.   It reminds me of poet Kenneth Koch's: "What's the point in everything Going on this Way like a chimney Or a pint of marriage, a Western carriage Cold and drear Like an Afric foe Whose stretcher bearer Is starving while Feeding him greens" (Kenneth Koch 1969)   Which is one of the points that the young are making these days to us old farts.   Here's another story.   Verdi had a gardener for many years who one day picked a pear from his tree and took a bite of it.    Verdi saw and instantly fired him.   He said,           "If he had asked I would have given him anything he wanted but he stole it and I won't allow anyone to steal  from me."    Verdi had so many people stealing his Intellectual Capital that he simply disciplined himself not to tolerate it anywhere.    Any gardener who had worked for a Master for all of those years and knew him so little wasn't much of a gardener.    That is one of the reasons that Verdi was so financially successful in a hard-nosed Aristo-Cratic process.    Masters will produce their finest work under stress, as a trick, but they are not fools.   To play continually on three strings would destroy skill.    The beginning of the process of Art in the West, is to "pay attention!"     Perception/Virtuosity/Intuition = Product    PVI=Pd     Mastery develops flexibility and ingenuity.    Things that are in short supply in this bifurcated economically religious world.    I began on this list several years ago by asking the economists why communism was so bad if Marx was a great economist.     Their reaction was to treat him as if he was from some other profession.    In the left and right metaphor, that is Alien Hand Syndrome.   You could never play the piano with it and neither could Perlman have played the violin either.     "The alien hand syndrome classically consists of involuntary movements accompanied by a feeling of foreignness     and personification of the affected limb. Autocriticism, in which patients criticize and express astonished     frustration with the behavior of the autonomous limb, is a commonly noted feature. Most cases of alien hand  associated with lesions of the supplementary motor areas of the frontal lobes, the corpus callosum, or both."     Groom-KN; Ng-WK; Kevorkian-CG; Levy-JK,  Baylor Univ.  1999 (Internet)"   When contemplating "bottom line" culture one should look up the meaning of insanity in the psychological profession.  The base meaning is from the latin meaning "whole".     Today we hear that Art is not a necessity for culture.   Such foolishness is Neandrethal.   Art defined Cro-Magnon from the Neanderthals.   It is a base process of the Cro-Magnon mind.   Without it a Cro-Magnon culture is not whole.   But that is not what this is about.   It is more simple than that. The issue is simple.   What is truly private? and what is truly owned?    What can be bought and sold and what cannot?    Does buying and selling represent the sum total of human value?     This is not so tough.  We can make up such questions all day long if we have ever read, gone to the theater or contemplated a Sonata even once in our lives.     The Internet is forcing the point that the artists didn't have the political power to force years ago.   If everyone felt they could live on cable sound bites and no connection the Internet wouldn't have that power either.    We should take warning that the Internet is new and that it took 121 years to convince the world that McArt in Movies, TV and Cable News was as exciting as a Verdi Opera and more real than the "Ode to Joy."     Personally, as I have gotten older,  McDiets make me physically ill no matter how much they advertise their nutritional values.   My consciousness may be stupid and "swayable" but my body isn't.    IT knows the difference and would rather die than accept what doesn't work.   Or as my French doctor says to me:  "Merd in, Merd out!   You would treat your automobile better!"    Ray Evans Harrell