Greetings All,
I'm quite surprised at some of the strong feelings coming out of the members
of the forum on this issue. Might as well throw my hat in the ring too...
MoQ War: When social patterns with mutually exclusive goals come into
contact with one another the result is often war or conflict. Any given war
will continue by whatever means available to the combatants until one side
or both sides no longer values continuing the struggle. During the war both
combatants force's will likely screw up, make mistakes, and/or have some
members of their armed force commit atrocities. While regrettable it would
seem, based on history, that this collateral damage is probably inevitable
and in proportion to the degree that a social pattern is distressed by the
action of the opposing pattern. Additionally this collateral damage (for
whatever reason) can extend the conflict indefinitely. If the values do not
change then the war will continue. In the case of Israel and the
Palestinians there are obviously some people who value continuing the
fighting so the fighting will continue. I think it unlikely that these
groups will be persuaded by force of arms (short of suffering 100%
casualties) and that leaves the only way to get these groups to stop
fighting is to make them value peace. A peace between two social patterns
is the result of an evolution of values on one or more sides of the
conflict. This evolution may require a considerable amount of time to work
out. Pirsig seems to indicate that the final solution to the problem may
not be foreseeable by the parties involved (As in the Zuni case). This
seems to lead to a philosophical stance of the individual doing what they
think as best based on their information. You follow your thinking, I'll
follow mine and the pattern with the highest quality WILL win eventually.
Car Salesman Bombs: All this talk about who is right and who is wrong,
international law, what the UN said, and who killed who in an unpleasant way
is an attempt to change peoples values. If I can convince you that fighting
is no longer valuable perhaps you will stop. It's encouraging that people
want to engage each other in these discussions but to my mind the Mid-East
situation will not be resolved by argument but sheer fatigue. The
Palestinians have got to be sick to death of living in those camps and the
Israeli have got to be sick of having their kids blown to tiny bits. If the
Israelis are not willing to cause the Palestinians 100% casualties then what
they really need is a slick sales presentation for peace and not more
weapons. Perhaps the US sending Israel some surplus car salesmen and a copy
of PowerPoint would do more for the peace process than another shipment of
Apache helicopters.
Use of Force and Compulsion: I would be curious to see a membership vote on
who supports the use of force to collect taxes? Currently all
implementations (that I am of aware of) of either system do this. With all
the debate on Socialism vs. Capitalism I wonder how both sides would use the
MoQ to favor forcing people to surrender property to the state under pain of
imprisonment or harm. I think a major criticism of Socialism is that it
requires more use of force than Capitalism.
Glen
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:02:10 BST