dmb said:
... I think it's pretty clear that Pol Pot, for example, depopulated the cities
sending everyone into the jungle and back to the stone age, was not guided by
intellect.
John replied:
I sorta thought he'd been infected by some intellectual ideas that made it
necessary to do that big etch-a-sketch thing where you reformulate your society
by shaking it while upside down, totally destroying all existing patterns so
that the new order could arise. And it's more moral for some intellectual
patterns to completely kill a society than it is for a society to kill
intellectual patterns. So he was actually doing a good thing, according to the
morality of hierarchical levels.
dmb says:
Your reasoning here is a bit wacky. Depopulating the cities and sending
everyone out to live in the jungle is an act of killing social and intellectual
values. Except for the fact that these people took their language and memories
with them, he practically reduced thing to a biological level. Seems pretty
obvious to me that the whole thing was motivated by some profoundly
anti-intellectual attitudes. To say those views were intellectual just because
he "thought" it was a good idea to kill a ton of people is more than a little
ridiculous. That's a bit like saying the NAZI project of genocide was
intellectual because anti-semitic attitudes had been expressed in books or
because the trains that took the victims to the camps were designed by
engineers. Obviously that horror was predicated on a kind of tribal racism, not
intellectual values. In this case too, these crimes were motivated by some
profoundly anti-intellectual attitudes. For the most part this was a
re-assertion of Ge
rman social level values but they also had a substantial back-to-nature
impulse running through it.
The socialism that Pirsig is talking about is the kind of thing you find in
Norway, Canada, France and the UK. In the United States, socialism can be seen
in things like FDR's New Deal, Johnson's Great Society. Social Security,
Medicare and Medicaid, the post office, public schools and the interstate
highway system are the products of socialism. Does that resemble the killing
fields or the gas chambers in any way? No, of course not.
But 63% of self-identified Republicans think Obama is a socialist and a lot of
them are not thinking of Canada when they call him that. These confusions and
distortions are really quite debilitating in our public debates and in this
forum. It gets so warped around here that some people (John) can see mass
murder and the deliberate collapse of a civilization as an intellectual act.
Man, that's really mixed up.
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