From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Sat Dec 06 2003 - 20:13:54 GMT
Platt
Thanks for really excellent quotes, good to see them again.
I certainly agree with Pirsig's analysis of why communism fails.
Yet here I am still a socialist, in the sense of wanting our
societies to be less materialistic and having less inequality.
The hope, and the rejection of what has failed in the past
will always fail and that the compromises of the present are
inevitable, is that we can have more equality, less materialism
and a more dynamic culture.
You are clearly an intelligent man, but I am amazed that you
are able to read these passages from Pirsig without seeing
that he is seeing what is both good and bad about communism
and capitalism. Clearly the ambitions of communism are higher
than those of capitalism. Capitalism has done more for freedom,
but do you not wonder if there is not a way to something better
than capitalism, that we do not have to put up with its shortcomings,
that the freedom to spend $10,000 on a watch is perhaps an
afront to morality, that burger and fries are not good food,
that the voting of the badly educated is a great danger,
that culture is being undermined by low quality entertainment?
Do you live in the best possible world? What is your dream of
real America? Please enlighten me. Maybe you have yet to share
your vision with us.
kind regards
David Morey
----- Original Message -----
From: "Platt Holden" <pholden@sc.rr.com>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Monday, December 01, 2003 12:52 AM
Subject: RE: MD Democracy in the MOQ
> 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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