[MD] Zen

[Arlo Bensinger]

[SA]
The brujo didn't come up with the values on his own.

[Platt]
Where did the U.S. values come from? "Someone has to be first."

[Arlo]
Don't waste your time playing this "chicken v. egg" game, SA. If you 
follow that line you are left with the idea of one lone man, standing 
in the wilderness, who says "I think I will invent culture!". Both 
the Brujo-self and the cultural values are evolved patterns, evolving 
in a mutual-dialogic manner. And if you follow this back and want 
some simplistic "first event", it was the moment two biological 
individuals realized together that the focus of the attention was 
shared with each other and began negotiating rudimentary symbol codes 
to capture that shared experience. Before that "event" there was no 
"self" and there was no "culture". After that event there were both. 
And the Brujo and the US value system are simply the result of 
"thousands of years of cultural evolution".