[MD] Zen

[pholden at davtv.com]

Quoting Arlo Bensinger <ajb102 at psu.edu>:

> [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".

Arlo flatly contradicts Pirsig. About those two biological individuals -- 
according to Arlo they both started talking simultaneously.

 
No matter how Arlo tries to justify a communitarian agenda, "Someone has to
be first."

 



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