Hello,
John B. wrote something that has been scratching at me, so I thought I'd work it out here.
He begins with a quote from RMP:
"….Where biological values are undermining social values, intellectuals must identify social behavior,
no matter what its ethnic connection, and support it all the way without restraint.
Intellectuals must find biological behavior, no matter what its ethnic connection, and limit or destroy
destructive biological patterns with complete moral ruthlessness, the way a doctor destroys
germs, before those biological patterns destroy civilization itself."
John comments:
"Strong stuff, and I hesitate to say I agree with it, though I appreciate where he is coming
from. In terms of carrot and stick, it seems to be all stick! There is a fascist feel to these
words that leaves me unsettled and uncomfortable."
The sheer ruthlessness in this Pirsig quote has always bothered me too. There's the sound of an axe being ground. Considering the murder of Pirsig's son, it's not hard to understand why the chief anti-hero in Lila was Jamie, the black criminal. Pirsig tries to understand Jamie, but is blocked. Hense the above quote is left dangerously unqualified (it empowers the semi-fascists).
One of my apprentices here in the Southern California construction biz is a young black kid whose dad is very much like Pirsig's Jamie. A pimp and criminal whose been in and out of jail. Once when he was out of jail his teenage son went to him for money and the man gave him some crack and told him to go make his own money. I've spent hours talking to the kid trying to help him restructure the values he has learned in life and it's a tough thing. I've had to get ruthless with him a couple times and when I do he comes back swinging!
The notion of bad biological patterns destroying civilization is no mere abstraction to me. When my apprentices go out for a biological night out on a Thursday and can't make it to work on Friday, I suffer along with them when the social pattern we work in begins to unravel. I think I would've given up by now and axed them all except there's not much better out there to replace them with. And also, I hate to ever give up on people.
The qualification to Pirsig's quote would go something like this: An intellectual divorced from feeling, cut off from human empathy and compassion, is ill-equipped to attack destructive biological patterns with moral ruthlessness". Period. Decisions by the Nazi's and the Kumar Rogue to wipe out "destructive biological patterns" were made with cold-blooded intellectualism and minimal empathy and compassion. Some of the hippies understood this, but does the MOQ?
Last night I was watching some report on space exploration. The space intellectuals were shown with all of their new devices for going faster and further into the cold reaches of space. They wanted to board asteroids and fit them with propulsion devices so they could extend their intellectual queries deeper and deeper. One woman suggested that biological robots would be needed to board these space craft since no human being could withstand the sheer boredom of a life travelling to the far reaches of endless intellectual frames of space-time. I watched this and thought to myself, "somebody's actually paying this woman to sit in some industrial building thinking all of this up".
It kinda made me mad because I tend to think that the resources used to extend and extend intellectual queries, could be better used caring for some of these social losers laying in gutters freezing to death. It seems to me that there are runaway intellectual patterns as well as biological patterns that equally threaten to destroy civilization. And not just in academia. Down the road from me in Hollywood there are people looking at reports who make cold, calculated decisions on what they will pump out to the civilization through the great transmitter of (EIC). The test results show that if you yank the monkey's chain properly, he will bring you his bananas--and that spells $$$. So the ruthless intellectual choice is…shock the monkey!
And so the poor kids without proper parenting get fixed into biological patterns. When they get to the point that they are threatening society, the ruthless intellectual choice is to warehouse them and perhaps even later use their biological body parts to add years to the lives of the rich and fortunate (and you might even be able to make robots out of them for the joy of endless intellectual discovery in cold space!).
Well, I'd better stop here as I'm starting to lose my own empathy and compassion. Don't want to grind my axe and cut off heads with it. I just wanted to point out the obvious. That human beings need proper alignment of all four levels. The pure energy of our inorganic parts must not be dissipated at any one level by the greedy demi-gods in charge.
"With one hand in my pocket and the other one flashing a peace sign" (Alantis Morrisette)
Bill Justin
mailto:elg14@earthlink.net
MOQ Online Homepage - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Unsubscribe - http://www.moq.org/md/index.html
MD Queries - horse@wasted.demon.nl
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:02:59 BST