Platt and all:
Lord have mercy. You nearly constructed a real political argument. Miracles
ARE possible!
Platt said...
Which is precisely why the U.S. is worth defending, as Pirsig patiently
explains in Chapter 17:
DMB says...
If you'd used "the dynamic nature of free markets" instead of simply "the
U.S." I think you would have really started something interesting. The
selected quotes are very appropriate to the topic, but you forgot some very
important cautionary comments. Pirsig also says that DQ is something that
neither the capitalists nor the socialists ever figured out. That's a
problem of SOM, not economies. He also said that most of the time capitalist
only advance these kinds of arguments in order to further their own
interests. And they way you have used them tetters on rationalization too.
Nevertheless, if we can begin to talk about how to preserve dynamic
economies and free markets while AT THE SAME TIME making sure that these
elements are intellectually guided in a way that includes human rights,
which is clearly the morally superior way to go - well, then I think you're
really onto something and a real conversation has begun.
Platt said...
I guess this defense of capitalism, free markets and free enterprise as
a social pattern puts Pirsig in the same category as the "painful" Roger
and the "unchangeable" Platt. Well, so be it. But it's sad to see that to
reduce the "pain of your transition" you find it necessary to put others
down.
DMB says...
Not at all. John wasn't insulting you. He wasn't even talking to you. And
that you saw John's remarks about Roger as a personal put down only shows
that you know something painful about yourself. That's what stings. Only you
and your hairdresser know for sure.
Getting back on topic...
Pirsig is pointing out the good things about free markets and spelling out
things that economists have never really understood, but its wrong to
construe his quotes as a blanket endorsement of capitalism, especially
considering that he explicitly says that socialism is morally superior. You
know it. Its in one of the quotes you selected. I'm tempted to call you
names for such an obvious blunder, but let's just say it was a mistake made
in the heat of the moment.
That's all. Below are Pirsigisms courtesy of Platt.
DMB
"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.
"And not just this city. Our greatest national economic success,
agriculture, is organized almost entirely in parallel. All life has
parallelism built into it. Cells work in parallel. Most body organs work in
parallel: eyes, brains, lungs. Species operate in parallel, democracies
operate in parallel; even science seems to operate best when it is
organized through the parallelism of the scientific societies."
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