[MD] Patterns

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Platt]
But completely and sadly overlooked  (or ignored) is the  role of the 
significant individual who changes society

[Arlo]
This is actually funny. "Completely overlooked"??? If you could get 
your head out of your dichotomy for even a microsecond, you'd see 
that far from devaluing the "individual", I herald the individual. I 
simply also pay similar herald to the role of the collective. BOTH, 
as I've argued countless times, are equally valuable, mutually 
dependent, and dialecticallly intertwined. Unfortunately, ANY 
recognition of the social processes (that Pirsig and others have 
recognized) in the formation of "mind" or "intellect" or "self" seems 
to be immediately met with a barrage of "he hates the individual" 
nonsense. I don't know how many times I have to say it, but I get the 
feeling that no matter how many times I do, since I (gasp!) agree 
with Pirsig's assessment of the role of the collective consciousness, 
or the fact that intellect derives from social participation, I'm 
going to get nothing but the same old, tired attacks. Arlo the 
commie. Arlo the nihilist. Arlo the devaluer of the Individual.

[Platt]
Without such singular movers and shakers societies would stagnate..

[Arlo]
And without society, there could be no "singular movers" doing 
anything but living like animals.

[Platt]
... and we would still be nomadic wanderers dressed in buffalo skins 
and hunting with spears.

[Arlo]
And what would we be were it not for society? For a collective 
consciousness, transmitting and structuring our ability to encode 
experience? We'd be even worse off than those "nomadic wanderers", 
we'd be like individual animals.

[Platt]
Some PERSON  that is, not an amorphous intellectual abstraction such 
as "collective consciousness."

[Arlo]
Absolutely. But that PERSON is not a lone autonomous agent. That 
PERSON derives his power to act, his agency, from his assimilation of 
the collective consciousness. His intellection comes out of his 
social participation, it is not counter to it, it is not in spite of 
it, it is BECAUSE of it. Had Pirsig not approprited the language, 
history, culture, voices, metaphors, etc. of his particular culture, 
he would have had NO ABILITY to formulate the MOQ. His voice, an 
important voice, is not a soliloquoy, it is a polyphany, it is a 
voice that is part of a dialogue, that derives it power from being 
part of a dialogue.

Same with the others I cite. They did not write, nor think, in Lone 
Autonomous Bliss. Their voices are significant, but this significance 
is because of the culturally dialogue they are part of.

This "war" between the "individual" and the "collective" is simply 
ridiculous. It's like the night being at war with the day. When 
Pirsig placed the social level between biology and intellect, he 
aligned himself with a way of thinking that overcame this dichotomy 
as well. Just as with the structurationalists who sought to unite 
agency and structure, and free them from their historical war, or 
Vygotsky who recognized that the "self" is a social phenomenon not a 
biological reality, or Bahktin who recognized that each voice is part 
of a dialogue... and while without voices there would be no dialogue, 
with the dialogue there would be no voices.

So stop with the ridiculous "Arlo completely ignores the individual" nonsense.