[MD] Flying Spagetti Monsters

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Platt]
So the "collective consciousness of all mankind" is always at the 
intellectual level while the collective state reflecting a national 
consciousness can never attain that level?

[Arlo]
I'm a little hurt, Platt. You praise Ben for his civility in discourse with 
me, but I get no praise for my civility towards him. What's the implication?

As to the above, I'd say the mythos is the collective sum of intellectual 
level patterns we use to make sense of the world. "You know something and 
then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality 
stimulus, but to define it all you've got to work with is what you know. So 
your definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what you 
already know. It has to be. It can't be anything else. And the mythos grows 
this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of 
analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective 
consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The 
Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to 
either side...that is the terra incognita of the insane."

In his condemnation of SOM, Pirsig writes of the modern "mythos", "The 
mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this 
world is unreal, that is insane!" Here  is a clear indication that the 
"mythos" represent the foundational intellectual level framework that 
informs our understanding of the world. The "mythos" arises, and evolves, 
through historical-dialectic activity of individuals in collective engagement.

Notice that the mythos is clearly dialectical in its emergence "the mythos 
is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues" and in its 
reciprocal informative nature "the mythos that says the forms of this world 
are real". If that's not enough, consider Pirsig said this shortly 
thereafter, "the villains who had so shaped the mythos as to cause us to 
accept this insanity as reality", and also, "the ancient Greeks, whose 
mythos had endowed our culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of 
our technology, the tendency to do what is "reasonable" even when it isn't 
any good."

The "state" or "nation" can, and often does, function in its moral role, 
checking biological quality while providing a greater level of freedom than 
existed on the biological level. However, its interests are only to itself, 
and like Pirsig describes in LILA about the Nazi regime, "it [the 
Holocaust] was a quality dictated by low level static social and biological 
patterns whose overall purpose was to retard the evolution of truth and 
Dynamic Quality." The same could be said of the Indian Wars, the Cambodian 
killing fields, the Inquisition or what is going on in Darfur or happened 
in Serbia.

Its also wise to heed Pirsig's caution, in LILA, "This solution is to 
dissolve all static patterns, both sane and insane, and find the base of 
reality, Dynamic Quality, that is independent of all of them. The 
Metaphysics of Quality says that it is immoral for sane people to force 
cultural conformity by suppressing the Dynamic drives that produce 
insanity. Such suppression is a lower form of evolution trying to devour a 
higher one. Static social and intellectual patterns are only an 
intermediate level of evolution. They are good servants of the process of 
life but if allowed to turn into masters they destroy it."

Furthermore, that the "state" can behave immorally is evidenced by Pirsig's 
placing the modern crisis as a war between intellect and society for 
dominance. "A value metaphysics makes it possible to see that there's a 
conflict between intellect and society that's just as fierce as the 
conflict between society and biology or the conflict between biology and 
death. Biology beat death billions of years ago. Society beat biology 
thousands of years ago. But intellect and society are still fighting it 
out, and that is the key to an understanding of both the Victorians and the 
twentieth century.... [T]he Victorians were the last people to believe that 
patterns of intellect are subordinate to patterns of society. What held the 
Victorian pattern together was a social code, not an intellectual one. They 
called it morals, but really it was just a social code. As a code it was 
just like their ornamental cast-iron furniture: expensive looking, cheaply 
made, brittle, cold, and uncomfortable. The new culture that has emerged is 
the first in history to believe that patterns of society must be 
subordinate to patterns of intellect. The one dominating question of this 
century has been, "Are the social patterns of our world going to run our 
intellectual life, or is our intellectual life going to run the social 
patterns?" And in that battle, the intellectual patterns have won."

As to the "national consciousness", I offer one more Pirsig quote. "[T]he 
essence of the Victorian value pattern was an elevation of society above 
everything else, then all sorts of things fall into place. What we today 
call Victorian hypocrisy was not regarded as hypocrisy. It was a virtuous 
effort to keep one's thoughts within the limits of social propriety. In the 
Victorian's mind quality and intellectuality were not related to one 
another in such a way that quality had to stand the test of intellectual 
meaning. The test of anything in the Victorian mind was, "Does society 
approve?""