"There are no chains more vicious than the chains of biological necessity into
which every child is born. Society exists primarily to free people from these
biological chains."
"cannibalism, not cooperation, was a pre-society norm … American
Indians … ambushed & tortured [other tribes] … maybe it is man’s
basic goodness which invented social institutions to repress this kind
of biological savagery in the first place."
"We must understand that when a society undermines
intellectual freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally bad,
but when it represses biological freedom for its own purposes it is
absolutely morally good. These moral bads and goods are not just
‘customs’. They are as real as rocks and trees."
Traditional religion fits neatly into this picture. Church morality, if you
will, is almost entirely about controlling our biological appetites. "Society
exists primarily to free people from these biological chains" and religion
certainly played a role in this but the allure of fame and fortune also plays a
major role.
"Celebrity is the Dynamic Quality that primitive social patterns once
used to organize themselves … an organizing force of the whole social
level of evolution. Without this … advanced complex human societies
might be impossible."
"… When you look back into the very first writing in the history of
the western world … Babylon … they’re about celebrity: I, Hammurabi am
the big wheel here. I have this many horses … concubines … slaves … oxen
… I am one of the greatest … kings there ever was … The Pyramids were
celebrity devices. All the statues … palaces … robes … jewels of social
authority: those are just celebrity devices. The feathers of the Indian
headdress. Children being told they would be struck blind if they ever
accidentally looked at the emperor. All the Sirs & Lords &
Reverends & Doctors of European address … badges & trophies …
promotions up the business ladder … election to ‘high office … feuding
and battling for prestige among academics and scientists … Celebrity. Even a
policeman’s uniform is a kind of celebrity … without celebrity
nobody would take orders from anybody and there would be no way you
could get the society to work … High school was really the place for
celebrity … jocks out playing football … pom-pom girls … You can measure
the quality of a university by comparing the relative strengths of the
celebrity patterns and the intellectual patterns. You never got rid of
the celebrities, even at the best universities, but there the
intellectuals could ignore them and be in a class by themselves. … the
Metaphysics of Quality says that movement upward from the
social mirrors of celebrity is a moral movement from a lower form of
evolution to a higher one. People should go that way if they can."
These are not new ideas, really. Plato construed things this way in a kind of
hierarchy of love. Those who love physical pleasure were the lowest, he
thought, while those who seek fame and fortune were higher than the hedonists
they still weren't as lofty as those who loved truth and wisdom, namely
philosophers like himself. It's a wide-spread and well-known way of thinking
about our situation. Pirsig is giving us his own version but the basic
categories really shouldn't be contentious or confusing.
Sorry, but all these weird questions and bizarre suggestions about defining
levels, adding levels, putting levels between levels, it's all just a bunch of
boring nonsense that never, ever goes anywhere. Yawn. Please wake me when it's
over.
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