Hello Ron, > Ron: > > Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which > guarantees the others. > - Aristotle > > Mary was asking what does the intellectual level value. Courage is a > fairly good answer for the reasons > Aristotle mentioned. > Most Primarily, the intellectual level values the social level. That > objectivism does not, highlights > the problem of Bo's SOL. > [Mary Replies] At my office we have the concept of knowledge silos. This came about due to the fact that my company historically achieves growth by purchasing other software companies and bringing them into the fold. Sometimes these technologies are wildly unrelated, thus accounting for the "silo effect" where you have whole groups of people with great depth of knowledge in a particular product line but none in the others. The recent corporate trend has been to break down these silos so that people can be productive across multiple product lines and even integrate them in new ways to create entirely new products.
This is a big challenge, as you can imagine. The learning curve required of everyone is incredibly steep and on top of that the motivations of the many points of view are sometimes very much at odds. Though it could be seen as a gross oversimplification, I think you could view these knowledge silos as somewhat analogous to Levels. At the lowest level would be the company itself, which we all want to see succeed so that we can continue to have jobs, but as you ascend into the higher levels where the silos are, the points of view (or patterns of values) start to diverge, sometimes wildly. Some silos might even like to see the destruction of some others. But only a really arrogant silo that's unwilling to acknowledge the larger good would wish for this when it risks the underlying stability of the company. If a silo attempting to destroy others fails to understand that if by so doing it threatens the foundations upon which it exists, then that silo could be considered to be of low Quality. Nobody argues that the Intellectual Level as defined by SOM seeks the ultimate goal of destroying the Social. That would be foolish and short-sighted. That idea may pop up from time to time as a dynamic, but is quelled by overall wiser forces at the same level. So, as Pirsig explains, there exists an uneasy relationship between all the levels. This I say to answer one objection you've raised. Another objection to SOM I've heard has to do with the idea that the Intellectual Level is the only one that's dynamic. This is untrue. All the levels, with the possible exception of the oldest, are not set in stone, but have the ability to continue to evolve. Biological evolution has not ceased, as far as I know, and neither has Social progress. As the newest level, the Intellectual is probably the most in flux, but that does not mean it has cornered the market on Dynamic Quality. This is an important point, I think, and one where a lot of our differences lie. The main area of discussion at the moment, though, has to do with courage. Courage may seem a good working value set for the Intellectual Level at first glance, but I don't think it is a "primary" value of the Intellectual Level. Courage is a high Quality value, but it has long been present with great prominence in the Biological and Social Levels. This objection alone is not enough to exclude it from the Intellectual. What does is the idea that courage is not a "value goal" in and of itself, but rather an enabler of values. Biological courage enables survival. Social courage enables domination or cooperation or both. Intellectual courage enables Intellectual freedom from Social control. Mary 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/md/archives.html
