[MD] From each... to each

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

[SA to Craig]
We are isolated due to our behaviors of leaving the house to go to work and
travel far to find the $ to get food on the table.

[Craig]
Economic activity/exchange need not isolate us.

[Arlo]
Craig's right, it need not isolate us. But under the current system, much labor
(and the greater lifestyle devoted to accumulating "things") does, in fact
isolate us.

In ZMM, Pirsig addressed this many times, from his observation that the cars on
the Interstate contained faces akin to a "funeral procession", to the West
Coast realization of the psychic disconnectedness of people in the more
"Victorian" lifestyles, to the simple, connectedness of those living "more
Indian" lives.

"I know what it is! We’ve arrived at the West Coast! We’re all strangers again!
Folks, I just forgot the biggest gumption trap of all. The funeral procession!
The one everybody’s in, this hyped-up, fuck-you, supermodern, ego style of life
that thinks it owns this country. We’ve been out of it for so long I’d
forgotten all about it."

By "out of it", of course, he means on the Plains, and in the mountains, where
the Indian value is still dominant. In Lila, Pirsig describes how he met
Dusenberry while teaching at the Academy in Bozeman, and how it was around this
time (confirmed thanks to Ian's Timeline) that Pirsig was involved in the
Peyote Ceremony, that led to the illumination that underscored his initial
thesis about Indian "freedom" and the value collision of Victorian-Indian that
was at the core of the American psyche.

Also, in ZMM (if you choose not to ignore it), there is strong correlation and
agreement between what Marx wrote about the alienating aspects of modern labor,
and the SOMist culture that divorced "art" from "assembly". I've been writing a
paper on this (slowly, though it seems), with the goal of presenting it here.
"Identification" with one's labor is central to both visions on the modern
problem.

Pirsig describes an experience with the new breed of mechanic. "But the biggest
clue seemed to be their [the mechanics'] expressions. They were hard to
explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing...and uninvolved. They were like
spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and
somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No
saying, "I am a mechanic." At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you
knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They
were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job."

To Pirsig, the underlying "isolation" brought by activity/exchange was due to
the SOM metaphysical firmament of our culture, an SOM culture being brought in
by Victorians whose goal was to establish a New Aristocracy based on "social
superiority" via wealth, whose modes of both production and consumption
followed SOMist principles. The more one leaves areas dominated by Victorian
morals, and enters areas dominated by Indian values, one sees both the SOMist
and the superiorist mindsets diminish, and thus one sees this "isolation" begin
to wane as well.

And in these borderlands, between Indian and Victorian, Pirsig was able to see
"what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of
dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to
manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own
dreams of power and wealth...but for this he had exchanged an empire of
understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part
of the world, and not an enemy of it."

Arlo