[MD] seeing beyond the mirror (was: Heads or tails?)

[david buchanan]

Case asked Kevin:
How in the world has rationality had tragic effects on human relationships?

Kevin replied:
The repression of strong feelings is a choice of rationality over feelings.  
When strong feelings are repressed they will fester.  This can lead to 
innapropriate expression with tragic consequences.  My sense is that 
Seung-Hui Cho chose rationality over feelings.  And I'd guess that he 
thought he was in control of his feelings.

dmb butts in:
As I understand it, Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents" spells out 
the MOQ's idea of an evolutionary relationship between the biological and 
social levels. Basically, Freud says that society demands that we tame our 
instincts and passions, that civilzation couldn't exist without some 
repression of the organism. Usually, this means laws that control sex and 
violence. But then Pirsig draws another line, one that Freud did not. The 
MOQ's fourth level, where rationality properly belongs, has a similar 
evolutionary relationship going with society except that this time society 
is the one to be tamed. This is where Socratic doubt comes in, the ability 
and the willingness to question tradition, to scrutinize authority, to 
critically examine the values of your culture.

In fact, in Pirsig's critique of 20th century intellectuals, he complains 
that they failed to realize the important function that social level 
morality plays and saw this repression as arbitrary and un-necessary. If 
memeory serves, Pirsig mentions the popularity of Meade's "Coming of Age in 
Samoa" in the early part of the 20th century. People seemed to love the idea 
that sexual practices could be so free. If its good enough for those 
islanders, they said to the flapper girl at the speakeasy, let's get it on. 
The "free love" thing tends to be associated with hippies, but they was more 
like the culmination of a thing that had been let out of the bottle by 
intellectuals long before them. And I've recently discovered that a kind of 
philosophical hedonism can be detected in a lot of the 20th continental 
philosophers too, including Freud. I forget the details, but was reading the 
other day about European thinker who views the orgasm as a profoundly 
spiritual event, quite literally confusing biological quality with Dynamic 
Quality. He thinks its deep but its just basic.

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