[Platt]
Pirsig tells why:
[Arlo]
And Pirsig points the way forward, rather than slipping back to Victorianism.
"The Metaphysics of Quality, however, says that's backward: the
Hippie revolution was the moral movement. The present period is the
collapse of values. The Hippie revolution of the eighties was a moral
revolution against both society and intellectuality"
The hippies of the past made a miscalculation. But the way the
conceived of initially is the moral direction we should be going.
Instead, we slide backwards to Victorianism.
"The Hippie rejection of social and intellectual patterns left just
two directions to go: toward biological quality and toward Dynamic
Quality. The revolutionaries of the sixties thought that since both
are anti-social, and since both are anti-intellectual, why then they
must both be the same. That was the mistake."
It is time to go back to the origins of the hippie movement, and move
toward Dynamic Quality not biological quality, against both society
and intellectuality.
Pirsig further descibes the "paralyzing intellectual system" and its
effects on American culture in ZMM.
"... technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in
an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish,
don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's
such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style." (ZMM)
He describes the effects of the "paralyzing intellectual system" further.
"Along the streets that lead away from the apartment he can never see
anything through the concrete and brick and neon but he knows that
buried within it are grotesque, twisted souls forever trying the
manners that will convince themselves they possess Quality, learning
strange poses of style and glamour vended by dream magazines and
other mass media, and paid for by the vendors of substance. He thinks
of them at night alone with their advertised glamorous shoes and
stockings and underclothes off, staring through the sooty windows at
the grotesque shells revealed beyond them, when the poses weaken and
the truth creeps in, the only truth that exists here, crying to
heaven, God, there is nothing here but dead neon and cement and brick." (ZMM)
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