Hi Platt
Platt Holden wrote:
Chris said:
...There can be no question in anyone's mind that the consumer-culture
that drives both individuals and entire nations to take the most rash
actions in order to sustain it, is a system that is totally, and
fundamentally a product of what the MOQ identifies as social level.
Platt replied with a quote:
"A free market is a Dynamic institution. What people buy and what people
sell, in other words what people value, can never be contained by any
intellectual formula."
dmb says:
The trick is to see that both things are true. Money is the measure of
social value AND the free market is a dynamic institution. Not only that,
but it's also true that the MOQ says an intellectually guided society is
more moral than one guided by social value. Platt reads "selectively" and
that's the part he always leaves out. And that's exactly the problem with
today's free market advocates; they think the market is the answer to
everything and that means social values rule.
In any case, it's wrong to imply that the MOQ supports these
anti-intellectual attitudes. I really don't see how an honest reader could
come anywhere near that conclusion.
"It is not that Victorian social economic patterns are more moral than
socialist intellectual economic patterns. Quite the opposite. They are less
moral as static patterns go. What makes the free-enterprise system superior
is that the socialists, reasoning intelligently and objectively, have
inadvertently closed the door to Dynamic Quality in the buying and selling
of things. They closed it because the metaphysical structure of their
objectivity never told them Dynamic Quality exists." (Lila, 17)
"Phaedrus thought that a Metaphysics of Quality could be a replacement for
the paralyzing intellectual system that is allowing all this destruction to
go unchecked. The paralysis of America is a paralysis of moral patterns.
Morals can't function normally because morals have been declared
intellectually illegal by the subject-object metaphysics that dominates
present social thought. These subject-object patterns were never designed
for the job of governing society. They're not doing it. When they're put in
the position of controlling society, of setting moral standards and
declaring values, and when they then declare that there are no values and
no morals, the result isn't progress. The result is social catastrophe."
(Lila, 24)
Then perhaps Platt could explain to us how the free market should make it
through the current "credit crunch" without the intellectual interventions being
set up by the same right-wing government that usually hate such measures.
To me, it seems the "free market" has been more short-sighted than usual. I
mean, I can understand that they don't care about our environment because that
won't strike back very soon, they might even elude it during their life time.
But to start eating off the very branch they're sitting on is pretty stupid even
for their standards. And now, as that free market is clinging to the half-eaten
branch for its life it screams to the ground, "Hey, if you don't save us, we'll
come crashing down on you, and that would hurt!"
Do you really think it's moral for the free market to cause so much pain to both
itself and the society it's a part of?
Another thing. Have you ever considered the possibility that the intellectual
"brain" of the society is *also* dynamic? Newsflash Platt, it IS!
This means that it's moral for the government to rule the free market, to
occasionally change the rules. And the thing is, the free market is ok with
that. It might change course a bit to make as much profit it can using the new
rules, but from the market's point of view, the new rules are simply DQ, as in:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
When a higher level intervenes with a lower, the lower level doesn't have a clue
what happened. It just adapts and goes on.
As we discussed a few months ago, and as both DMB and Chris said, you're abusing
quotes from Lila to suit your own agenda. Please start thinking for your own
instead.
Magnus
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