Arlo said to Ant and dmb:
...I think its often a bit more insidious than simple ego or attention. For
example, it was painfully obvious from his many posts that, for Bo, "SOL" was a
means to elevate Euro-Christian culture as morally superior to those inferior
dark-skinned Muslims. ...Platt, in a similar vein, had a two-fold agenda.
...In both ways, the SOL served to ensure that white-conservative values had
moral dominance over immigrant-liberal (SOL) values. ..With Marsha the SOL made
strange bedfellows, as it was obvious that for her the SOL gave her a way of
rebelling against 'male-dominated' institutions. "Intellect" was, basically,
just dumb, boring white males, and the SOL gave her a excuse to ignore whatever
'they' said. ..Marsha flat out rejected reason itself, and flaunted her
incoherence as evidence of moral superiority over all the dumb, boring white
males who just didn't 'groove'. For Marsha, Lila was the hero to emulate;
Phaedrus was just another stupid man trying to tie her down with re
ason and intellect. John, well, he's the guy who... evidences a gross
misunderstanding of Pirsig's entire undertaking. But, of course, that's where
the ego comes in, and he simply turns all the evidence of this misunderstanding
into proof of his genius. His incoherence, in his mind, is proof only that no
one understands his brilliance.
dmb says:
That's how I see it too. They all have a right-wing, social values thing going
on. Platt was just the most conspicuous partisan. But John has his
fundamentalism and right-wing populism. Marsha is a business school type with a
fondness for Barry Goldwater (and Platt's paranoid politics). They all pretend
to understand Pirsig but they all just use his work as an ink-blot test,
projecting their own anti-intellectual attitudes onto parts of it and ignoring
or distorting the rest. They like to pretend they're above intellect in various
ways - too mystical, too artsy, too free, too smart or whatever - but the truth
is they just can't or won't take intellectual values seriously. They must find
some way to shit on it, to put it down, or otherwise feel superior to the
people and things that seem to seem to be rejecting them.
I've become convinced that contemporary conservatism is not really an ideology
so much as a form of mental illness.
I'm not kidding.
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