Re: LS Power and the MOQ

From: Diana McPartlin (diana@hongkong.com)
Date: Tue Apr 06 1999 - 05:41:24 BST


Hi Squad

Horse wrote:
>This months topic is:
>
>H.N.Brailsford has said "the crude issue of power... is always the
>last of the realities that sensitive and reasonable men can bring
>themselves to face".
>
>What, if anything, does the Metaphysics of Quality have to say about
>the realities of power.

(the topic questions are on the website btw)

I'll go along with Jason's starting point for power in the MOQ as
"gumption" from ZMM.
Jason

>With regards to "power", isn't an implication made throughout both books
>that "power" is something that everyone has? I think "gumption", as he uses
>it in ZAMM, is the same as the "power" that is being used here. In ZAMM,
>Pirsig speaks briefly of "gumption traps" and ways to get out of them.
>These traps are destructive to quality. The implication is that gumption
>(or power) isn't something to "get a hold of". Rather, it is something that
>everyone both has and should learn how to channel, or avoid "gumption
>traps". Power literally defined is the capacity to do work. Pirsig would
>say that everyone has power. "Empowering" is an adjective that has a good
>connotation, but "power" - by definition - really can't be broken into
>subclasses as good and bad, etc. The "capacity to do work" is simply this.

It's the experience of being energized, not good or bad in itself but just
being "able". Also agree that it's not something you possess, it's more a
question of being in the flow of things, being carried along, the
distinction between yourself and the objective world becomes less and you
feel good.

When we talk about power we are most often talking about power at the
social level, power over other people - popularity, charisma, fame. At the
biological level power is health, physical and sexual energy. Power at the
intellectual level seems not so obvious, it's not power over others nor
over your own body. I was wondering how to explain intellectual power, then
I had breakfast with some friends from the mainland this morning and one of
them said he had just retired from teaching and was writing books on
science and philosophy. There followed an enthusiastic if tortuous (he only
knew the Mandarin names of his favorite philosophers) conversation. Then
when we said goodbye he joked, "once you start thinking about these things
you can't ever stop." Well that there is intellectual power -- the gumption
that makes you want to spin ever more perfect intellectual patterns. It
transcends generations and cultural barriers. It's empowering, perhaps even
compulsive, but there is no attempt to control anyone else. (Of course we
do try to control and convert others to our thinking all the time but that
is social getting mixed up with intellectual and we need to distinguish
between the two.)

It sounds like I'm talking about Dynamic Quality and I think I am mostly.
Power or gumption is about moving towards Dynamic, but static also has an
important role to play.

Kevin puts it rather more classically as:
>What the Metaphysics of Quality says about the
>realities of power is they should be perserving statically while evolving
>Dynamically.

Which I think is right. A good method of static latching is essential to
the pursuit of greater Dynamic so it's also an important ingredient in
power.

So much for what power is, however I believe Horse is suggesting we talk
about power on a grander scale.

>"Until the First World War the Victorian social codes dominated. From the
>First World War
>until the Second World War the intellectuals dominated unchallenged.From
>the Second
>World War until the seventies the intellectuals continued to dominate,
>but with an
>increasing challenge - call it the 'Hippie revolution,' - which failed.
>And from the early
>seventies on there has been a slow confused mindless drift back to a kind of
>pseudoVictorian moral posture accompanied by an unprecedented growth in
>crime"
>R.M.Pirsig Lila Ch.24 P.353 Pub. Black Swan

I haven't lived through these generations but it seems obvious to me that
power today lies in the social level. I generally agree with what Chomsky
says about the tyranny of giant corporations who basically control
everything. And, even though he rants too much for my taste, I think he's
also right that they try to repress individual thought. In my description
of intellectual power above I made it sound rather impotent because it
doesn't seek to control others, but actually the intellect is the only
thing that can overthrow the social level so it's actually very powerful.
The social level works by playing on the human tendency to go along with
the crowd and fit in. If people start switching their brains on and asking
too many questions then the social level collapses.

And can the MOQ help? I think it can for a couple of reasons.

It helps us to clarify the issues. When you start condemning the "evil
corporations" for everything it's easy to sound like some paranoid
conspiracy theorist. But then when you ask who are these evil people then,
it's not obvious. You can point to the Fortune 500, the media, the
pointy-haired bosses, the pr industry etc. And yet we can see these people
ourselves and quite honestly they aren't evil at all. So you have this
situation where everyone can see what's wrong but nobody is very sure who's
doing it. To his credit Chomsky does realize that, he says: "I don't mean
to say they're conscious of it. In fact, they're not." But I don't think
he makes a big enough deal out of it. When you understand the social level
as Pirsig paints it you can see that this social "giant" that's
controlling all of us doesn't just live in "them". Sure it manifests itself
more in some people than others, but basically it's all of us. The media
and the pr industry are not populated by evil people, they're just human
and it is human nature to go along with the crowd and that's all they do.
If you want to solve a problem you need to understand precisely what that
problem is and how it came about and the MOQ does help us understand social
power.

I also think the MOQ helps us to keep our heads on. Chomsky is fond of
making wild accusations about the evil of big business, and he's probably
right, but still, our economic and social systems are like that and they
might not be perfect but they're what we've got. The MOQ's message of
respect for the lower levels reminds us to take a more reasoned approach.
When Eastern Europe decided to dismantle its social and economic
infrastructure overnight a lot of people urged China to do the same, but
China insisted on the slow track piece-by-piece approach instead.
Regardless of what their actual motives are there does seem to be a lot of
sense in that. Obviously you can't just destroy a social level without
figuring out what you're going to do next.

Diana

MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org



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