Platt said to Krimel: The last thing we need is "intellectual interference" by some central planner in Washington like Krimel who in his arrogance thinks he knows how to spend my money better than than I do. In that direction lies tyranny.
dmb says: There is no way to square this talk-radio nonsense with the MOQ. Chapters 22 and 24 of Lila cover politics and both chapters are full of examples and explanations. Naturally, Pirsig's comments about the dynamism of free markets have to be understood in the context of those other political comments. They are many quotable quotes to quote if one wanted to make a case for socialism. The very same distortion could easily be pushed in the opposite direction. But it's probably a lot more important to understand ALL the comments so that they fit together into a larger, coherent picture. Instead, your case is way too selective and way too emphatic. If you look at those chapters it's pretty clear that the over-riding theme is the conflict between static social quality and static intellectual quality. Discussions of the relative dynamism of economies aren't unimportant, but the conflict between levels is the star of the show. The historical examples are useful in explaining which political ideologies are social and which are intellectual. This is as useful for understanding the levels as it is for understanding politics. And this is where you see the big picture, where you see who is who in the social-intellectual conflict. The MOQ doesn't paint socialism as "tyranny", not unless the word suddenly means "dull". The MOQ supports the various laws and programs that impose intellectual control on social level values. It says this is more moral. Examples include the Bill of Right, FDR's New Deal, LBJ's Great Society and more extreme European examples. Pirsig has criticisms to make, cites their mistakes and such, but are still deemed better and morally superior to an uncontrolled social level economy. The MOQ doesn't reject socialism or "intellectual interference". It doesn't embrace free markets. The MOQ advocates intellectual control that also recognizes the advantages of dynamism. It only corrects socialism. The MOQ doesn't condemn it. Social levels values have bee expressed as anti-intellectual movements stretching all the way back to the Victorians. Extreme examples include fascism and fundamentalism. One would hope that today's conservatives would be milder than that but there's a shocking amount of overlap with the extremists. Any you, sir, are an example of one of these. Anyway, the anti-intellectuals don't exactly look like the good guys in this war. He's not cheering for capitalism so much as pointing out what's good about it, what the intellectual level ideologies should take on board. Pirsig reserves some of his most brutal insults for people of this anti-intellectual mind set. Bigoted, ignorant, hopelessly static, hopelessly stupid, cold and brittle. That fits into the big picture too. That makes sense in terms of what social values are, what they look like in real life. _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail® has a new way to see what's up with your friends. http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/WhatsNew?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutorial_WhatsNew1_052009 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
