[MD] socialism

[plattholden at gmail.com]

On 4 Jun 2010 at 10:53, Steven Peterson wrote:

Hi Platt,

> Back in the 1930's America came to a fork in the road and chose the road to
> serfdom. In MOQ terms, social patterns of coercive cooperation have overcome
> intellectual patterns of individual liberty.


And yet the twentieth century is often called "The American Century."
Despite it's choice of serfdom in the 30's, apparently the US still
managed to emerge as the most wealthy and influential nation in the
world. Not a bad record for the American brand of "coercive
cooperation."

What was that ideal time in America's pre-1930's history when things
were better than they are now? If you had to go back to that time now
but could not choose whether you would go back as a wealthy white
heterosexual male or a chinese immigrant or a female or a native
American or a black person would you?

Best,
Steve

Hi Steve,

The U.S. earned the label of "The American Century" largely by winning WW II 
due to the superiority of it's industrial base built by the Rockefellers, 
Vanderbilts Carnegies, and Fords,  the "Robber Barons" of the late 19th and 
early 20th century, operating in largely capitalistic economy. With the 
exception of Bill Gates the list of great entrepreneurs has shrunk to bite 
size. The road to serfdom taken in the 30's has taken an awful toll. 

Going back to pre-1930's I would choose to be born in the U.S. where the 
prospects for a better life for all children, regardless of sex or color, were 
better than anywhere else in the world. The millions who chose to emigrate to 
the U.S.(and continue to do so today) were living proof of how capitalism, the 
economic system of freedom that allowed individuals to to responds to DQ, 
created opportunity and prosperity unseen before in all of human history. 

Unfortunately, most of that is now behind us. Pirsig describes the current 
situation beautifully, but sadly:

"What seemed to allow this deadly night to descend was that the intellectual 
patterns that were supposed to be in charge of things, that should comprehend 
the threat and lead the fight against it, were paralyzed. They were paralyzed, 
not by any external force, but by their own internal construction, which made 
them unable to comprehend what was happening.

"It was like watching the spider waiting while the wasp gets ready to attack 
it. The spider can leave any time to save its life but it doesn't do so. It 
just waits there, paralyzed by some internal pattern of responses that make it 
unable to recognize its own danger. The wasp plants its eggs in the spiders 
body and the spider lives on while the wasp larvae slowly eat it and destroy 
it.

"Phaedrus thought that a Metaphysics of Quality could be a replacement for the 
paralyzing intellectual system that is allowing all this destruction to go 
unchecked. The paralysis of America is a paralysis of moral patterns. Morals 
can't function normally because morals have been declared intellectually 
illegal by the subject-object metaphysics that dominates present social 
thought. These subject-object patterns were never designed for the job of 
governing society. They're not doing it. When they're put in the position of 
controlling society, of setting moral standards and declaring values, and when 
they then declare that there are no values and no morals, the result isn't 
progress. The result is social catastrophe." (Lila, 24) 

Best,
Platt