[MD] French ingredient in the soup of sentiments

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

[Arlo previously]
Remember that the problems in consumption/production described in ZMM are a
result NOT of government interference, but of an SOMist-based free-market.

[Craig] 
Do you have a citation for this statement?  It doesn't sound familar.

[Arlo]
In ZMM, the crisis originates from an undergirding SOMist mindset that has
deteriorated both production and consumption. No government agency was forcing
this onto the "market". As Pirsig said...

"Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern
American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized
typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized
food in stylized kitchens in stylized houses. Plastic stylized toys for
stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their
stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it
once in a while. It’s the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped
over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by
people who, though stylish, don’t know where to start because no one has ever
told them there’s such a thing as Quality in this world and it’s real, not
style. Quality isn’t something you lay on top of subjects and objects like
tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and
objects, the cone from which the tree must start."

No one was FORCING the market to provide "stylized refrigerators" and "plastic
stylized toys". No one was forcing people to "buy them". But they WERE - in the
free market - because "no one has ever told them there's such a thing as
Quality".

Here, Pirsig is correct in demonstrating that any "market" is not without
constraint, indeed, it is constrained by the metaphysical underpinnings of the
culture.

Pirsig continues, "but he knows that buried within it are grotesque, twisted
souls forever trying the manners that will convince themselves they possess
Quality, learning strange poses of style and glamour vended by dream magazines
and other mass media, and paid for by the vendors of substance."

Finally, Pirsig offers this. "To speak of certain government and establishment
institutions as "the system" is to speak correctly, since these organizations
are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle.
They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all
other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally
meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure
demands that it be that way. There’s no villain, no "mean guy" who wants them
to live meaningless lives, it’s just that the structure, the system demands it
and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure
just because it is meaningless."

Pirsig correctly points out that the root problem is not "certain government and
establishment institutions", but rather "structural conceptual relationships"
(the cultural value system, language). What we need, the book proposes, is to
abandom SOMist structural thought, which lead to the "death force", the
dealignment of craft with art, the production of junk, and the consumption of
the same, paid for and supported by the "vendors of style". SOMist "free
market". Or perhaps rather, there is no such thing, really, as a "free market",
because the market is alwasy constrained by the dialogic, metaphysical values
of the culture. When those "values" are SOMist, you get all the problems Pirsig
describes, problems continuing today since, of course, its STILL an SOMist
market. 

This SOMist market (which of course Pirsig rightly discusses as involving BOTH
consumption AND production) has had profound impact on the Quality of Labor. He
says, "When one isn’t dominated by feelings of separateness from what he’s
working on, then one can be said to "care" about what he’s doing. That is what
caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one’s doing. When one
has this feeling then he also sees the inverse side of caring, Quality itself."
It is this "care", this "identification", that Pirsig feels is also at the core
of the problems he is addressing. "The creator of it feels no particular sense
of identity with it. The owner of it feels no particular sense of identity with
it. The user of it feels no particular sense of identity with it. Hence, by
Phædrus’ definition, it has no Quality." 

Another key statement in ZMM Pirsig makes is, "Programs of a political nature
are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the
underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right
only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is
first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there."
In Pirsig's writing, individuals, dominated by an SOMist mindset, were NOT
responding to Quality, because they could not see it. The entire book is an
attempt to correct that, to give people a vocabulary, a dialectic if you will,
with which to effect change, first in their own "values", then naturally the
"social values" will change, and finally then will the political.

Does that answer your question, or perhaps you'd care to show me how the
problems in ZMM are the result of "government interference in the market"?

Arlo