[MD] Proud to be a Brit / Pommie

[Platt Holden]

> I agreed with gav that focussing on the numbers is a mugs game and
> misses the real sustainability issues, but I have to take comfort in
> the fact that the antidote to capitalism (ideology) is pragmatism (ie
> anything but ideology).

"But the Metaphysics of Quality states that practicality is a social 
pattern of good. It is immoral for truth to be subordinated to social 
values since that is a lower form of evolution devouring a higher one.
The idea that satisfaction alone is the test of anything is very dangerous, 
according to the Metaphysics of Quality. There are different kinds of 
satisfaction and some of them are moral nightmares. The Holocaust produced 
a satisfaction among Nazis. That was quality for them. They considered it 
to be practical. But it 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. James would probably have been horrified to 
find that Nazis could use his pragmatism just as freely as anyone else, but 
Phaedrus didn't see anything that would prevent it. But he thought that the 
Metaphysics of Quality's classification of static patterns of good prevents 
this kind of debasement." (Lila, 29)