Daniel Jon Roger and Y'all: Some thoughts about money.... After talking it over with some friends, I've decided that its not just some sappy sentiment: The best things in life REALLY are free. That is to say, a person can not purchase the most treasured things in any store. Things like love, respect, enlightenment and happiness can not be exchanged for any amount of money. ***** The freedom to shop is very far away from the Enlightenment Philosophers' idea of political liberty and is even further away from Pirsig's idea of Dynamic freedom. ***** Pirsig makes several telling references. The dog race is set up so that the mechanical rabbit is never really caught, and even if you ever got a taste of it you'd wonder why you ever ran after it in the first place. He was angry when his frat brothers sold out to the corporations. In chapter 17 Pirsig writes, "Phaedrus had always believed science is a search for truth. A real scientist is not supposed to sell out that goal to corporations who are searching for mere profit. Or if they had to sell out in order to live that was nothing to be happy about." "He was on his way to India, done with the corporate psuedo-science, still pursuing truth, knowing that to find it he would have to get free of the Giant first." Socialism is more moral because "It's a higher form of evolution. It is an intellecutally guided society.....That's what gives social ism its drive" But they were SOMists, they didn't know about DQ. "..The meta physical structure of their objectivity never told them DQ exists." ... "That's what neither the socialists nor the capitalists ever got figured out." He says the Victorians were really just a bunch of rich hicks. "Its not that the Victorian social economic patterns are more moral that socialist intellectual economic patterns. Quite the opposite. They are LESS moral as static patterns go." He refused to SELL his book to Hollywood. ****** All modern economic theories were formulated and implemented within SOM and suffer from it's amoral objectivity. Everyone from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to Ludwig Von Meisis is essentially a materialist in that sense. Its telling that Ayn Rand, the greatest popularizer of capitalist individualism, refers to her philosophy as "Objectivisim". ****** Unmoderated Social Darwinism is the worst kind of economics. It can't even manage to respect social level values and turns our economic enviroment back to the laws of the jungle. It is degenerate insofar as it assumes biological values where there should be social values, at least. Pirsig complains about the meaninglessness of the "survival of the fittest" in biological Darwinism. He says it like saying the "survival of the survivors". It doesn't tell you much about evolution. Naturally, the MOQ injects morality and values there and at every level. ****** Money is a medium of exchange, an easier and simpler method than barter. It represents labor or goods. It is a symbol of value. Its abstract value. In light of the MOQ it seems there is a moral dimension to the way each of us earns and spends money. Would you work in a factory that made cheap automatic weapons or rubber kiddy-porn dolls? Would you purchase goods produced by slave labor? Do you give any of it away? If so, do you give it to American kids so they can play baseball in handsome uniforms or to the most needy? ****** Imagine what the world would be like if each financial transaction was honestly evaluated in moral terms and every choice in the market was based on that evaluation. I mean, what if price and value reflected each other perfectly? Wow. There's an ecomonic system I could love. ****** Its easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle, than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. ****** Money can cost you your life. ****** The best part of the story in NOT the crucifiction. Oh, no. That's too gory and dramatic. The best part of the story is when he turns the money tables over. That's WHY they killed him. ****** Colors of the sun. Flashing on the watertops. Echo on the land. Digging for a COIN. Many other tiny worlds slipping past my hand. Dying men draw numbers in the air. And dream to conquer little bits of time. Scuffle with the crowds to get their share. And fall behind their little bits of time. (JACKSON BROWN) MOQ Online Homepage - http://www.moq.org Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/ Unsubscribe - http://www.moq.org/md/index.html MD Queries - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
