[MD] MD 4th level - The more autonomous level

[Platt Holden]

> [Platt]
> Since I don't believe there is such a thing as "collective consciousness"
> I'm not confused. Consciousness is only known by individuals, one person at
> a time. Likewise, there's no collective "mind."
> 
> [Arlo]
> Pirsig think so. :-)

Oh? I can't find a single reference in Lila. You would think if it's all 
that important he would have mentioned it in his latest work.

> [Platt] 
> Self-defense is to protect individual freedom. Changes benefiting the free
> market are to ensure individual opportunity. As for Walmart, I'm puzzled
> why you rant and rave against a firm that makes goods affordable to the
> poor and "disadvantaged" whom you worry about. 
> 
> [Arlo]
> My point is that even our society has it's "in the public good" moments.
> And many of them you support. The trouble, maybe you'd agree, is that each
> of us think that "we know" what the "public good" is. When you support the
> war, it is because "you know" what the "public good" is moreso than those
> who are against it. When I suppport public libraries, it is out of a belief
> that "I know" what the "public good" is.
> 
> Here is where we attempted before to bring the MOQ into the "public good"
> discussion. How can (or should, to some) the MOQ be used to frame a
> dialogue on what constitutes the "public good", and what constitutes
> "stifling". There is, as you say, obviously a little of each in everything.
> Public libraries do indeed rely on taxation, which could be argued to
> "stifle" business, but, the free access to information (I believe) provides
> a greater good than harm. You could say the same thing about the military.
> 
> My "rant and rave" against Walmart is based on a similiar look at balance.
> Yes, on one hand Walmart provides "cheap" goods to poor families, but on
> the other side, its labor practices convert local jobs into low-paying
> menial jobs that reduce the ability of local economies to provide better
> paying jobs. Its a snake swallowing it's own tail.

I consider your economic analysis of the Walmart effect on the local job 
market to be somewhat dubious. I don't think the decision on where to 
build a new Honda plant is affected one way or another by the proximity of 
a local Walmart. 

> I also believe firmly in Pirsig's long talk on value and care in the labor
> activities of individuals. Remember his bad experiences with "modern"
> garages? The radio playing, the "disconnect" between "who the are" and
> "what they do"? No identifying with the job? I think when you read ZMM, and
> pay close attention to this thread of thought, the difference between the
> "funeral procession" of commuters on the Interstate, and the "here and
> nowness" of the small towns, you can get a lot of insight into "the way
> labor should be" and "the way it is". "Identification" and "care" play
> greatly into what makes labor meaningful.

The message in Lila was that even an assembly line worker can care about 
what she is doing. I believe he used the Japanese worker as an example.

> Sometimes you "conservatives" :-) really confuse me. There is so much talk
> about the values of "entrepreneurship", and the glories of self-reliance,
> about how the struggle to "own your own business" is great, but also the
> most rewarding and fulfilling destiny man can achieve. And yet you back
> large corporations that undersell and put these struggling entrepreneurs
> out of business, and turn them into retail clerks, earning minimum wages at
> a job whose only real function is to make SOMEONE ELES wealthy.

Oh brother. Big bad corporations again. I hope you realize that corporate 
American has done more to alleviate poverty than all the intellectuals and 
politicians combined.
 
>You speak jolly about saving $1 on your meat, while small entrepreneurs 
>are
> forced out of business and into becoming deli-clerks. I would think that
> conservatives, such as yourself, would gladly support your local small
> business man, whose efforts to be self-reliant are noble, and whose income
> feeds back into the local community, enriching the lives of all in the
> area. I mean, isn't this last part the conservative mantra?

Some win, some lose. That's the conservative mantra. It's not the liberal 
mantra of entitlement. 

> [Platt]
> You're confusing a society of cells with a society of people. Pirsig 
> clearly distinguishes the two.
> 
> [Arlo]
> No he doesn't, you revisionist, you. He says, "People look upon the social
> patterns of the Giant in the same way cows and horses look upon a farmer;
> different from themselves, incomprehensible, but benevolent and appealing.
> Yet the social pattern of the city devours their lives for its own purposes
> just as surely as farmers devour the flesh of farm animals. A higher
> organism is feeding upon a lower one and accomplishing more by doing so
> than the lower organism can accomplish alone."
> 
> The progression of the MOQ is always "emergence of a higher level
> (organism) from the collective activity of individuals on the previous
> layer".
> 
> Collective activity by atoms on the inorganic level leads to the emergence
> of a higher level, the biological. Collective activity of biological
> individuals leads to the emergence of a higher organism (in Pirsig's words,
> as I just quoted) , the social layer. Collective activity on the social
> level (social mediation, in Pirsig's words) leads to the emergence of the
> Intellectual level. This is pretty straight-forward stuff. 
> 
> Pirsig goes on, "When societies and cultures and cities are seen not as
> inventions of "man" but as higher organisms than biological man, the
> phenomena of war and genocide and all the other forms of human exploitation
> become more intelligible."... " From a Metaphysics of Quality's point of
> view this devouring of human bodies is a moral activity because it's more
> moral for a social pattern to devour a biological pattern than for a
> biological pattern to devour a social pattern. A social pattern is a higher
> form of evolution. This city, in its endless devouring of human bodies, was
> creating something better than any biological organism could by itself
> achieve."
> 
> And a little further down, he comments on the similiarity between the
> "society of cells" and the "society of people" (as each give rise to a new
> level of emergence)... "People, like everything else, work better in
> parallel than they do in series, and that is what happens in this free
> enterprise city...  And not just this city. Our greatest national economic
> success, agriculture, is organized almost entirely in parallel. All life
> has parallelism built into it. Cells work in parallel. Most body organs
> work in parallel: eyes, brains, lungs. Species operate in parallel,
> democra­cies operate in parallel; even science seems to operate best when
> it is organized through the parallelism of the scientific societies."

Pirsig writes:. "Societies is used figuratively here as a more colorful 
word meaning "groups."  If I had known it would be taken literally as 
evidence that cells belong in the social level I would not have used it.  
Maybe in a future edition it can be struck out. One can also call ants and 
bees "social" insects, but for purposes of precision in the MOQ social 
patterns should be  defined as human and subjective.  Unlike cells and 
bees and ants they cannot be detected with an objective scientific 
instrument.  For example there is no objective scientific instrument that 
can distinguish between a king and commoner, because the difference is  
social." (LC, #49) 

> [Platt]
> Rather than "collective consciousness" I would say that I "came into 
> being" in an environment consisting of various patterns ranging from the
> inorganic to the intellectual plus a dynamic moral element.. 
> 
> [Arlo]
> And Pirsig would likely respond, "What keeps the world from reverting to
> the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos,
> transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge
> that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that
> one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one
> pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is."
> 
> [Platt]
> You call them "structures," while I prefer "patterns" Same difference. They
> make up the total environment. (By the way, you're included.)
> 
> [Arlo]
> Agree. In my use (just to clarify), I'd say that I consider a "structure"
> to be a pattern that is so "entrenched" or "solidified" as to not have much
> change over generations. And also to emphasize that these entrenched
> patterns have significant power of the potentiality of human agency (while,
> of course, also being the source of that agency), hence the word
> "structuration". 
> 
> [Platt]
> You have to ask of every attempt to use coercion to alleviate natural
> constraints "At what cost?" and "Where's the evidence?" For all the
> billions taxed from others to alleviate poverty, poverty is still as
> widespread as ever.  
> 
> [Arlo]
> I agree. One must always be critical of actions undertaken in this regard.
> As Pirsig said of Truman, "Harry Truman, of all people, comes to mind, when
> he said, concerning his administration’s programs, "We’ll just try them—and
> if they don’t work—why then we’ll just try something else." That may not be
> an exact quote, but it’s close."
> 
> Let me ask you, though. Do you think poverty is a natural condition of man
> in any society? That is, should we just accept it as a "necessary evil"?
> When you are enjoying your Christmas ham this year (a pagan tradition, by
> the way), and there are people likely a few miles away who have no food, is
> it really your contention that "that's not my problem"? Indeed, that it's
> not really a "problem" at all, but a necassary "thinning of the herd", to
> separate those with value from those without?
> 
> Let me preempt this by saying that I don't think it's possible to eradicate
> "poverty" in a monetary-based society. To me, that's actually a
> metaphorical oxymoron. "Poverty", as we commonly use the term, is a
> "relative" index. I am "too poor" to afford a Ferrari. The whole IDEA of
> fixing a high-cost to a Ferrari is to limit its access to only those in the
> extreme upper percentiles of wealth. But, while I agree that attempts to
> equalize wealth are always doomed to failure (because of the structure of
> our society), I also strongly believe that there are some social programs
> that are not only "just", but quite "moral". Taxation funds, while they
> should not be used to "give everyone a Ferrari", should indeed be used to
> provide basic nutrition and sustinence to those who, for one reason or
> another, are without capital means to acquire themselves. Prenatal and
> postnatal care for families lacking capital income I also have no problem
> supporting (although I would like, in all cases, reception of social
> support to be tied to social activity, as we discussed... for example, that
> mother who received socially supported prenatal care could, at some point,
> volunteer in a soup kitchen, or teaching kids how to read, or delivering
> meals to shutins... or using whatver valuable skills she has to repay
> society in kind).

I think the world would be much better off if we didn't insulate people 
from their bad decisions.

Platt