Good - I was aware that these were the passages you were thinking of. I
suspect that means that the capitalists shouldn't leave dynamic quality out
of the equation either - and in circustances where Danila's proposal, or
some moderated for of it, has Dynamic Quality, that might be what we go for.
Lets's not contain what people value in any intellectual formula, statist or
otherwise.
Pzeph
> From: "Platt Holden" <pholden@cbvnol.net>
> Reply-To: moq_discuss@moq.org
> Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2001 08:51:52 -0500
> To: moq_discuss@moq.org
> Subject: Re: MD Danila's 'statism'
>
> 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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