Who decides? Who decides? Everybody thinks they are on the side of
right. It's the way Lila said it was... There's no way "he" can be
wrong... It just goes, on and on and
on... Left? Right? Middle? It just circles back onto itself one
way or the other. There is no escaping it.
At 04:06 AM 1/8/2009, you wrote:
Hi Steve,
I don't think we needed Ken Wilbur to point out that you need to break
a few eggs to make an omlette.
Achieving something better always involves damaging / disadvantaging /
hurting / killing / destroying something else - Darwin formalized that
process. The only thing inherent or essential about human nature is
that it is evolved & evolving. When the power of better ideas fails to
persuade (at the intellectual level), Pirsig (and Nietzsche and
others) show us that physical force is morally empowered to overcome
physical force (at the social and biological levels). There are
morally just uses of lethal violence, from the individual, right up to
the the scale of wars. I don't think any of us are "pacifists"
pussyfooting around that.
The question is begged of who decides when the "stronger violence is
in saner hands" and whether the moral balance is net positive - when
is it "sane" to hurt / kill / destroy for some "greater good" ? Basic
ethics / moral philosophy.
It is what I keep coming back to - "governance" in a general sense -
who decides, and how ? We have a framework (the MoQ) for how these
issues of value relate, but who decides ?
That "sanity" is in the intellectual level of individuals. What should
the relationship be between individual intellects and collective
societies - where (if any) are the (enforcable) social limits to (act
on) intellectual freedom ?
Ian
On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 8:20 PM, Steven Peterson
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Marsha, Arlo, Ron,
>
> I dabbled in pacificism for a while, but Pirsig among others convinced
> me that humans are not intrinsically good. This is not to say that
> they are intrinsically evil, either. Pragmatists have given up for
> looking for essences which includes trying to talk about human nature
> as good or evil because we don't want to talk about an essence of
> humanity either.
>
> Can we achieve are goals without ever resorting to violence (including
> participating in a governement that has a police force and a
> military)? I doubt it. As Ken Wilbur pointed out, the only thing that
> has ever controlled violence is stronger violence in saner hands.
>
> Best,
> Steve
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Albert Einstein: "Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my
consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who
strive for truth, beauty and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated."
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