[MD] Distinguishing Levels

[Steve Peterson]

Hi Craig,

This comes as part of The Giant discussion in Ch 16 while walking through NY:

"When they call it freedom, that's not right.  "Freedom" doesn't mean
anything.  Freedom's just an escape from something negative.  The real
reason it's so hallowed is that when people talk about it they mean Dynamic
Quality.
That's what neither the socialists nor the capitalists ever got figured
out.  From a static point of view socialism is more moral than capitalism.
It's a higher form of evolution.  It is an intellectually guided society,
not just a society that is guided by mindless traditions.  That's what
gives socialism its drive.  But what the socialists left out and what has
all but killed their whole undertaking is an absence of a concept of
indefinite Dynamic Quality.  You go to any socialist city and it's always a
dull place because there's little Dynamic Quality.
On the other hand the conservatives who keep trumpeting about the virtues
of free enterprise are normally just supporting their own self-interest.
They are just doing the usual cover-up for the rich in their age-old
exploitation of the poor.  Some of them seem to sense there is also
something mysteriously virtuous in a free enterprise system and you can see
them struggling to put it into words but they don't have the metaphysical
vocabulary for it any more than the socialists do.
The Metaphysics of Quality provides the vocabulary.  A free market is a
Dynamic institution.  What people buy and what people sell, in other words
what people value, can never be contained by any intellectual formula.
What makes the marketplace work is Dynamic Quality.  The market is always
changing and the direction of that change can never be  predetermined.
The Metaphysics of Quality says the free market makes everybody richer by
preventing static economic patterns from setting in and stagnating economic
growth.  That is the reason the major capitalist economies of the world
have done so much better since World War II than the major socialist
economies.  It is not that Victorian social economic patterns are more
moral than socialist intellectual economic patterns.  Quite the opposite.
They are less moral as static patterns go.  What makes the free-enterprise
system superior is that the socialists, reasoning intelligently and
objectively, have inadvertently closed the door to Dynamic Quality in the
buying and selling of things.  They closed it because the metaphysical
structure of their objectivity never told them Dynamic Quality exists.
People, like everything else, work better in parallel than they do in
series, and that is what happens in this free enterprise city.  When things
are organized socialistically in a bureaucratic series, any increase in
complexity increases the probability of failure.  But when they're
organized in a free-enterprise parallel, an increase in complexity becomes
an increase in diversity more capable of responding to Dynamic Quality, and
thus an increase of the probability of success.  It's this diversity and
parallelism that make this city work."

Regards,
Steve

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