Marco and all:
Again, nice work. In my book you're batting 1000, but on one point I think
you failed to get a hit. You didn't stike out, but didn't get a hit either.
You walked because none of the pitches went over the plate. Or something
like that. Anyway, you wrote...
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4th moral principle "Individuality is better than the mass"
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Attention. Individuality should not be mistaken for individualism. David B
showed that intellect is both about individuality (example: the Brujo) and
cooperation (example: the Scientific community). Right - I don't agree on
the opposite, but it doesn't matter here. The point is that a *true
intellectual* scientific community is composed of scientists that are all
freely following their intellectual interest. This forum is intellectual
'cause we are all following freely our personal interest. The fact that more
or less our interests are similar and MOQ-based make it possible to have an
intellectual cooperation, based upon our free individuality.
While I appreciate you attempts to carefully qualify this 4th moral
principle by trying to make a distinction between individuality and
individualism, I think it still doesn't work very well. If I may impersonate
Bo for a moment, there's a SOM ghost in the idea of setting the individual
up against the collective. Pirsig tackles it in many ways, over and over
again. It can lead to that terrible secret loneliness, to solipsim, to a
situation where each of us is like a single ship out on the ocean trying
desperately to communicated by radio. It can lead to a confusion between
biological freedom and intellectual freedom. It can lead to the destruction
of social values and a return to the law of the jungle. He says that all of
us are totally embedded in society, that we cannot escape the mythos and if
we think otherwise then we do not understand what the mythos is. He says
that Descartes can think only because French culture exists, etc, etc..
Simply put, rights protect intellectual freedom, but their purpose is to
improve society and to protect the evolutionary process. Rights are
meaningless outside of society. Rights are univeral, they are supposed to
belong to everyone equally, yet they're intellectual values. Even Science,
like all intellectual pursuits, is impossible in isolation. In fact, the
very notion of a heroic individual rising up to defy society is
mythological, and as such it is a feature of the social level. Its at least
as old as civilization itself.
My point. Painting the 4th moral principle as a contest between the one and
the many only leads to confusion. That's just not what its about. How about
this instead...
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4th moral principle "Rights are better than "the law".
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