Hi Arlo, [Arlo]
> Are you advocating anarchy? If not "intellectuals", then who should be in > charge? Clergy? CEOs? > J: Thanks for asking. First of all, "Intellectuals in charge" is a misnomer. The minute social control is instantiated we are in social territory - that is politics of some stripe or another. When Ideas are shared they automatically take on some sort of social aspect. You can argue that smart people should be in charge of dumb people but that's an old argument that's been refuted by history. Hitler put the retarded to death but I wouldn't hold that up as a good model of governance. The ideal democratic regime is where the people are in charge of themselves. The fact that this system has its weaknesses doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. A: > > Also, by what rationale do you advocate "freedom" to do "whatever you > want" for the intellectual and social levels but not the biological level? > Does "freedom" only pertain to social and intellectual activity? Why not > biological? > J: Because freedom to eat your neighbor and breed with his wife is a bad thing. Humans always have at least some sort of social control upon their behavior. This is evident in every human group that science has uncovered. > > [John] > He says that sometimes anti-intellectualism is good. You prat on about > fascism as anti-intellectual but there's a very intellectualized attempt at > social control going on there. > > [Arlo] > "Anti-intellectualism" is never good. J: Arlo, if you are going to stray from the verbatim words of Robert M. Pirsig himself, I don't know what to say to you: "The Metaphysics of Quality, however, says that's backward: the Hippie revolution was the moral movement. The present period is the collapse of values. The Hippie revolution of the eighties was a moral revolution against both society and intellectuality." "Againt intellectuality" is the same as "anti-intellectual" and according to Pirsig, that WAS the moral movement so I cannot but conclude that your statement is not in the interest of the MoQ but your own position as an intellectual. Arlo: There is a difference between advocating for an expansion of intellect (as > Pirsig does) and suppressing reason to social control. More specifically, > you are conflating "anti-SOM" with "anti-intellectualism", a mistake made > by those who continue to mistakenly equate SOM and intellect. > I'm a simple guy and I choose to use my terms according to the standard definitions. I type the word into google and I get: noun: *intellect* 1. the faculty of reasoning and understanding objectively, esp. with regard to abstract or academic matters. "he was a man of action rather than of intellect" Take care, John 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
