Hi Elephant:
To keep the issue of “statism” related to the MOQ, here’s Pirsig’s
comparison of socialism to capitalism, from Chap. 17 of LILA:
“From a static point of view socialism is more moral than
capitalism. It's a higher form of evolution. It is an intellectually
guided society, not just a society that is guided by mindless
traditions. That's what gives socialism its drive. But what the
socialists left out and what has all but killed their whole
undertaking is an absence of a concept of indefinite Dynamic
Quality. You go to any socialist city and it's always a dull place
because there's little Dynamic Quality.
“On the other hand the conservatives who keep trumpeting about
the virtues of free enterprise are normally just supporting their own
self-interest. They are just doing the usual cover-up for the rich in
their age-old exploitation of the poor. Some of them seem to
sense there is also something mysteriously virtuous in a free
enterprise system and you can see them struggling to put it into
words but they don't have the metaphysical vocabulary for it any
more than the socialists do.
“The Metaphysics of Quality provides the vocabulary. A free market
is a Dynamic institution. What people buy and what people sell, in
other words what people value, can never be contained by any
intellectual formula. What makes the marketplace work is
Dynamic Quality. The market is always changing and the direction
of that change can never be predetermined.
“The Metaphysics of Quality says the free market makes everybody
richer-by preventing static economic patterns from setting in and
stagnating economic growth. That is the reason the major
capitalist economies of the world have done so much better since
World War II than the major socialist economies. It is not that
Victorian social economic patterns are more moral than socialist
intellectual economic patterns. Quite the opposite. They are less
moral as static patterns go. What makes the free-enterprise
system superior is that the socialists, reasoning intelligently and
objectively, have inadvertently closed the door to Dynamic Quality
in the buying and selling of things. They closed it because the
metaphysical structure of their objectivity never told them Dynamic
Quality exists.
“People, like everything else, work better in parallel than they do in
series, and that is what happens in this free enterprise city. When
things are organized socialistically in a bureaucratic series, any
increase in complexity increases the probability of failure. But
when they're organized in a free-enterprise parallel, an increase in
complexity becomes an increase in diversity more capable of
responding to Dynamic Quality, and thus an increase of the
probability of success. It's this diversity and parallelism that make
this city work.
This passage, which makes eminently good sense to me, is what
I had in mind when I wrote:
“I’m not accusing Danila of anything other than perhaps ignoring
history and the role of Dynamic Quality whose ‘only perceived
good is freedom.’”
Platt
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