"There are so many kinds of problem people like Rigel around, he thought, but
the ones who go posing as moralists are the worst. Cost-free morals. Full of
great ways for others to improve without any expense to themselves. There's an
ego thing in there, too. They use the morals to make someone else look inferior
and that way look better themselves. It doesn't matter what the moral code is -
religious morals, political morals, racist morals, capitalist morals, feminist
morals, hippie morals - they're all the same. The moral codes change but the
meanness and the egotism stay the same." (RMP, 'LILA', Chapter 7)
Ron said to Lucy:
Lets see, you exhibit feminist morals and hippie morals you use them to make
others look inferior. You are full of great ways for others to improve without
any expense to youself, a meanness and egotism fill your every post. And you
reject intellectual morality.
dmb says:
Yup. This is just another cheap stunt, of course, because the issue of morality
is totally unavoidable when discussing Pirsig's books. They are an inquiry into
values and morals and in his vision the world is composed of nothing but
values.
The idea that intellectual values are beyond the range of some people is on
display in the very structure of the book Marsha is quoting from - but
moralistic people like Dick Rigel are motived by social level values. Lila, the
character, is even worse and would likely be improved by adopting even the
lowest forms of social values. I think Pirsig's moral hierarchy explains
Marsha's hostility toward intellectual values. This is simply outside of her
range. She just can't see it so that intellectual criticism is, for her,
indistinguishable from mere meanness and egotism.
"“ZMM was a rather inspirational book; it made everybody feel better in the
end. LILA is a confrontational book; everybody in it dislikes everybody else;
nobody understands anybody else; everybody’s fur is constantly getting rubbed
the wrong way including the fur of many readers. Phaedrus has changed from a
romantic mystery figure to a rather disagreeable intellectual. The setting is
grotesque and depressing and so is the plot. So why, you may wonder, did I
write it that way?”
“.... For some reason this book just wanted to be cross and depressing. I never
knew why when I was writing it but I think now that maybe I subconsciously felt
that the MOQ was way too important to be sugar-coated. Its primary concern is
not what is popular – popularity is a social goal – its primary concern is
truth. When you say two times two is four you should not have to say it in a
way that is pleasing to an audience – it’s four no matter how crossly you say
it. The feeling as I wrote LILA was, look, this is what I believe, take it or
leave it, and it was just that kind of declaration all the way through and a
lot of people have left it.”
“In ZMM the narrative tends to dominate the intellectual part of the book - the
metaphysics - but in LILA the metaphysics clearly dominates the narrative. The
three main characters are metaphysical chess-pieces. Lila embodies biological
values, Richard Rigel embodies social values, and Phaedrus embodies
intellectual values. The reason none of them get along is because their values
are mismatched."
Intellectually speaking, she ain't got gumption. Not a drop of it. In fact, she
hates it and wants to destroy it or undermine it whenever she can. She doesn't
care about truth or philosophy and one can see this quite clearly not only in
her attitudes but also in the incoherent jumbles of words she's constantly
posting, the careless and contradictory use of philosophic terms and her
constant distortions and dismissals of the textual evidence. As she reads it, a
crass and crazy whore is the hero of this story. What does THAT tell you about
Marsha?
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