[MD] Emergent Consciousness

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

[Plattman Speaketh So]
But, when I suggest that his intellectual level might better be designated as
the individual level to include principled individuals and to emphasize the
ongoing battle for dominance between the free- thinking individual and the
conformist collective, you would think I had personally nailed Jesus to the
cross.

[The Jarloker]
What was clever was the way you included a list of Victorian social values and
ipso facto decided those where what constituted a "morally principled person".
In short, you may have well as posted; conservatives are morally principled
people, liberals are not, liberals are trying to push morally principled
conservatives out of the MOQ hierarchy, when they belong at the top. You would
have saved yourself a lot of textual effort.

Oddly, many times I've tried to introduce the concept of arete, as Pirsig talks
about in ZMM, into the discussion. It was this example, I believe, that comes
closest to someone living nearest to Quality. But because this has tinges of
things that your Party despises, you always ignore it, or dismiss it as new age
hooey. We've talked many times also, and recently, on the moral values of the
Indians, which you dismiss in their entirety save for one sentance, the one (no
surprise) that does conform to Party Ideology. Go figure. 

So its inane for you to say that no one here discusses the "morally principled
person", you're just upset because no one here holds Sam Walton up as the
iconic representation of this, as your list of exclusively social Victorian
values demonstrates you do. Maybe some consider Chief Seattle an exemplar of a
"morally principled person", or maybe the hero of the Odyssey, who Pirsig
describes filled with arete, which "implies a respect for the wholeness or
oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a
contempt for efficiency...or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an
efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself."

Yet, the question itself is inane, as Ant has shown. "Morally principled" in the
MOQ begets the question "at what level". Copernicus was "intellectually morally
principled" when he placed reason above the law of the church. Your lauded
Victorians were "socially morally principled" when they placed social
restraints on biological quality that would have otherwise destroyed society.
When Phaedrus "does" Lila (to use a sexist euphanism) he is acting "morally
principled on the biological level". 

But your attempt is simply to raise neocon-Victorian social values to the level
of intellectual patterns, and then define the Superior Quality Person as one
who adheres to these, and this is simply immoral. And why should that be worthy
of anyone's time? It just "return to Victorianism" all over again in some new
packaging du jour.