From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Tue Jul 27 2004 - 18:02:37 BST
Hi Paul
> Platt said:
> Both DMB and Paul narrowly define success as fame and fortune.
>
> Paul:
> Not so, I suggested that fame and fortune are currently, in western
> culture, the *dominant* measure of success, and highlighted that they
> are social quality measurements. The reason I did this was to
> demonstrate that your idea of individual success being a purely 4th
> level goal is incorrect.
As I've tried to point out, individual success can be attained in many
ways other than by adopting the social patterns of fame and fortune.
Individual success can be predicated, for example, on creating a new
software program characterized by intellectual values such as "clarity,
precision of description, explanation or prediction of experience."
(quoting Paul). Individual success can also be predicated on the social
values of rearing and educating one's children, or by a career in the
military protecting society from biological criminals. There are literally
a thousand and one ways individual success can be defined within the moral
structure of the MOQ. To focus on just one measure of success, fame and
fortune, seems to me to be a distortion of experience and reality.
> Platt said:
> I doubt if they would apply that definition to themselves as
> individuals, but rather use the term's primary meaning of "favorable or
> desired outcome."
>
> Paul:
> That's irrelevant. Once again, I suggested that fame and fortune are
> currently, in western culture, the *dominant* measure of success.
> Therefore, when you say that individual success is the highest good you may
> first need to point out that you are talking about success in the sense of
> "achieving favourable and desired outcomes," and not necessarily making
> money or becoming famous, and when you've done that you might want to
> qualify this with "except if that desired outcome is flying an aircraft
> into a skyscraper, torturing a child, running a scam, shooting the
> president, selling crack........"
>
> Or, to make things easier, you could say that there is a natural
> evolutionary moral order of things, and we can categorise the behaviour of
> individuals according to this framework to show that an individual should
> not be free to achieve every desired outcome they can think of.
>
> In other words, I think that when you wave the flag simply for
> "individual success," you are right back in the soup and fundamentally
> uprooting the structured morality of the MOQ.
I don't believe I have ever divorced the individual from the moral levels.
If I did, let's get it straight now. I fully affirm Pirsig's view that an
individual consists of collection of static patterns from all levels
including and most importantly a "collection of ideas" that "take moral
precedence over social patterns of value." Unlike any social level
pattern, an individual is a "source of thought" and is thus at a moral
level above society. "It is more moral for an idea to kill a society than
it is for a society to kill and idea." (Lila, 13).
Placing the individual at the top level does not in any way allow the
individual to escape from social or biological value patterns. He couldn't
even if he wanted to because the individual consists of those patterns as
pointed out above. Thus, to suggest an individual could be considered a
success by shooting the President or selling crack is simply a straw man.
The definition of individual success is restricted by the same moral
values that restrict all human beings.
> Paul:
> From my point of view, I was countering your claim that individual
> success is a 4th level pattern by showing that this success occurs at
> other levels. If there are narrow definitions being made, the idea that the
> individual is a purely 4th level pattern tops them all.
Yes, individual success can occur at other levels as pointed out above.
What puts the individual at the top level is his role as the source of
intellect, of ideas, without which the MOQ doesn't work or even exist at
all. (I don't think ZMM and Lila were written by a committee.)
In a separate post Paul wrote:
"I really think the MOQ defends the individual in terms of the ability to
respond to DQ which can "improve" patterns at "any level," and it is
within the domain of the static levels to make sure that the whole
structure is not undermined by the Dynamic activity."
I agree! Without the individual pattern -- the responder to DQ and the
source of intellect -- there's no evolutionary improvement. Without the
static patterns, there's chaos.
Best,
Platt
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