[MD] SOM's defect comes home to roost

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Platt quotes Pirsig]
"What makes the free-enterprise system superior is that the socialists..."

[Arlo]
Well, if that's your "proof" that capitalism "has 
a provision for morals", then reason must too, since reason created capitalism.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. While "the 
free market" keeps the door open to Dynamic 
Quality, the "market" is only as good as the 
underlying metaphysical base of the population. 
An S/O culture produces and sustains an S/O market.

"... but he knows that buried within it are 
grotesque, twisted souls forever trying the 
manners that will convince themselves they 
possess Quality, learning strange poses of style 
and glamour vended by dream magazines and other 
mass media, and paid for by the vendors of 
substance. He thinks of them at night alone with 
their advertised glamorous shoes and stockings 
and underclothes off, staring through the sooty 
windows at the grotesque shells revealed beyond 
them, when the poses weaken and the truth creeps 
in, the only truth that exists here, crying to 
heaven, God, there is nothing here but dead neon and cement and brick." (ZMM)

"The city closes in on him now, and in his 
strange perspective it becomes the antithesis of 
what he believes. The citadel not of Quality, the 
citadel of form and substance. Substance in the 
form of steel sheets and girders, substance in 
the form of concrete piers and roads, in the form 
of brick, of asphalt, of auto parts, old radios, 
and rails, dead carcasses of animals that once 
grazed the prairies. Form and substance without Quality." (ZMM)

"Capitalism", like "science", is flawed by its 
S/O underpinnings, flawed by its inability to 
conceive of something more than either "profit". 
As I pointed out many times in the past, this 
leads to the type of alienation Marx wrote about.

"The creator of it feels no particular sense of 
identity with it. The owner of it feels no 
particular sense of identity with it. The user of 
it feels no particular sense of identity with it. 
Hence, by Phædrus' definition, it has no Quality." (ZMM)

"But the biggest clue seemed to be their 
expressions. They were hard to explain. 
Good-natured, friendly, easygoing...and 
uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had 
the feeling they had just wandered in there 
themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. 
There was no identification with the job. No 
saying, "I am a mechanic." At 5 P.M. or whenever 
their eight hours were in, you knew they would 
cut it off and not have another thought about 
their work. They were already trying not to have 
any thoughts about their work on the job. In 
their own way they were achieving the same thing 
John and Sylvia were, living with technology 
without really having anything to do with it. Or 
rather, they had something to do with it, but 
their own selves were outside of it, detached, 
removed. They were involved in it but not in such a way as to care." (ZMM)

As I said, this S/O alienation as the foundation 
of "capitalism" has left us with a system that 
sees human beings as "resources", commodities to 
be bought and sold on the market with no 
consideration towards anything but how they (as 
resources) effect "profit". While GM execs give 
themselves millions in bonuses, they lay off 
thousands of workers. And the reason for this is 
that the same S/O mentality that underscores 
"reason" also underscores "reason's child"- capitalism.