From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Mon Dec 01 2003 - 00:52:56 GMT
Hi All:
Just to add some "fair and balanced" coverage to DMB's latest radical
left-wing screed (like, communism can be non-authoritarian?), ponder
these words of our friend and mentor, Robert M. Pirsig from 'Lila,"
chp. 17:
"That's what neither the socialists nor the capitalists ever got
figured out. From a static point of view socialism is more moral than
capitalism. It's a higher form of evolution. It is an intellectually
guided society, not just a society that is guided by mindless
traditions. That's what gives socialism its drive. But what the
socialists left out and what has all but killed their whole undertaking
is an absence of a concept of indefinite Dynamic Quality. You go to any
socialist city and it's always a dull place because there's little
Dynamic Quality.
"On the other hand the conservatives who keep trumpeting about the
virtues of free enterprise are normally just supporting their own self-
interest. They are just doing the usual cover-up for the rich in their
age-old exploitation of the poor. Some of them seem to sense there is
also something mysteriously virtuous in a free enterprise system and
you can see them struggling to put it into words but they don't have
the metaphysical vocabulary for it any more than the socialists do.
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 valve, 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."
Looks to me like the big winner in the MOQ scheme of things is free-
market capitalism. Or are Pirsig's words too plain and direct for
sophisticated intellectuals to understand?
Platt
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