Daniel Jon Roger and Y'all: Some thoughts about money....
After talking it over with some friends, I've decided that its not just
some sappy sentiment: The best things in life REALLY are free. That is
to say, a person can not purchase the most treasured things in any
store. Things like love, respect, enlightenment and happiness can not be
exchanged for any amount of money.
*****
The freedom to shop is very far away from the Enlightenment
Philosophers' idea of political liberty and is even further away from
Pirsig's idea of Dynamic freedom.
*****
Pirsig makes several telling references. The dog race is set up so that
the mechanical rabbit is never really caught, and even if you ever got a
taste of it you'd wonder why you ever ran after it in the first place.
He was angry when his frat brothers sold out to the corporations. In
chapter 17 Pirsig writes,
"Phaedrus had always believed science is a search for truth. A real
scientist is not supposed to sell out that goal to corporations who are
searching for mere profit. Or if they had to sell out in order to live
that was nothing to be happy about."
"He was on his way to India, done with the corporate psuedo-science,
still pursuing truth, knowing that to find it he would have to get free
of the Giant first."
Socialism is more moral because "It's a higher form of evolution. It is
an intellecutally guided society.....That's what gives social ism its
drive" But they were SOMists, they didn't know about DQ. "..The meta
physical structure of their objectivity never told them DQ exists." ...
"That's what neither the socialists nor the capitalists ever got figured
out."
He says the Victorians were really just a bunch of rich hicks.
"Its not that the Victorian social economic patterns are more moral that
socialist intellectual economic patterns. Quite the opposite. They are
LESS moral as static patterns go."
He refused to SELL his book to Hollywood.
******
All modern economic theories were formulated and implemented within SOM
and suffer from it's amoral objectivity. Everyone from Adam Smith to
Karl Marx to Ludwig Von Meisis is essentially a materialist in that
sense. Its telling that Ayn Rand, the greatest popularizer of capitalist
individualism, refers to her philosophy as "Objectivisim".
******
Unmoderated Social Darwinism is the worst kind of economics. It can't
even manage to respect social level values and turns our economic
enviroment back to the laws of the jungle. It is degenerate insofar as
it assumes biological values where there should be social values, at
least. Pirsig complains about the meaninglessness of the "survival of
the fittest" in biological Darwinism. He says it like saying the
"survival of the survivors". It doesn't tell you much about evolution.
Naturally, the MOQ injects morality and values there and at every level.
******
Money is a medium of exchange, an easier and simpler method than barter.
It represents labor or goods. It is a symbol of value. Its abstract
value. In light of the MOQ it seems there is a moral dimension to the
way each of us earns and spends money. Would you work in a factory that
made cheap automatic weapons or rubber kiddy-porn dolls? Would you
purchase goods produced by slave labor? Do you give any of it away? If
so, do you give it to American kids so they can play baseball in
handsome uniforms or to the most needy?
******
Imagine what the world would be like if each financial transaction was
honestly evaluated in moral terms and every choice in the market was
based on that evaluation. I mean, what if price and value reflected each
other perfectly? Wow. There's an ecomonic system I could love.
******
Its easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle,
than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
******
Money can cost you your life.
******
The best part of the story in NOT the crucifiction. Oh, no. That's too
gory and dramatic. The best part of the story is when he turns the money
tables over. That's WHY they killed him.
******
Colors of the sun. Flashing on the watertops. Echo on the land.
Digging for a COIN. Many other tiny worlds slipping past my hand.
Dying men draw numbers in the air. And dream to conquer little bits of
time.
Scuffle with the crowds to get their share. And fall behind their little
bits of time.
(JACKSON BROWN)
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