When the Trenchcoat Mafia's massacre in Colorado occurred, I shook my head
and thought, "Gee, I was a social outcast, too. My friends and I
half-jokingly discussed mock attacks on teachers and schoolmates... we staged
bottle-rocket wars in the schoolyard, though not with homemade explosives.
But I even obtained a bootleg copy of the Anarchist's Handbook from a local
BBS. And trenchcoats were quite the fashion for pariahs in my high school as
well."
I wondered where my friends and I went "right" rather than wrong. None of
the guys in my circle had close relationships with their parents, nor did
I... therefore I think social quality, or 'family values', had little
directly to do with our failure to progress from social outcasts to genuine
sociopaths. I think it was mostly intellectual, a conscious decision to
avoid such an ignominious end.
Having such experience, I feel more kinship with the attackers than the
victims.
I have read of monks that knowledge of sin can be an asset in helping others
to avoid it. I do not know whether that is widely held true, but it has the
ring of truth. Why should first-hand experience of fallibility be a guide to
excellence? Isn't it said that the hand that is burned takes advice about
fire to the heart?
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I think the MoQ would state that if "perfection" denotes an ultimate absolute
state, then it is highly undesirable. It does not allow DQ; instead it
assumes that a set of static conditions (however you define them) are the
ultimate goal, and that makes it dogma.
I think it far more likely that "perfection," if desirable, is a process, not
a goal. It is akin to an iterative function whose limit approaches infinity:
one never quite reaches the supposed final iteration. One just keeps
'plugging away'.
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In the history of science, one sees many examples of seminal "discoveries"
made by separate parties. For example, non-Euclidean geometry, invented by
Poincare, closely followed by Bolyai, Lobachevski and Riemann.
I think we see a different sort of convergence in society, for example, when
individuals in varying cultures invent similar laws, or when varying
individuals within a culture come to similar conclusions, as at moq.org.
Everyone is on the same Quality track, whether driving the engine, hopping
the boxcars or hotfooting it among the railroad ties; at certain times, in
some ways, we converge.
One may also draw parallels in biology. Consider the very different
ancestries of gill-breathers and aquatic mammals.
If there is a "perfect" state of society, in which the four levels peaceably
coexist while admitting the possibility dynamic improvement... well, I think
it's on the right track now.
We may never completely converge... and if we did, wouldn't that spell the
beginning of the end of DQ? Stagnation is death. Yet I agree with Bill:
"It's very possible that mankind's descendants will go as far beyond us as we
have gone beyond the early primitive humans."
Four cents -
Scott
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