[MD] Another parallel

[Arlo Bensinger]

[DMB]
As anyone can clearly see, my original post did not say the hippies 
were "solely against Victorian social values".

[Arlo]
Of course not. The goal here for Platt was to distort and distract. 
Plain and simple. And to do so he had to commit an egregious rhetoric 
maneuver, which you pointed out. I'll repost.

[Platt before]
The hippie revolution was a challenge to the defective intellectual 
level, not the social level.

[Platt one post later in a reply that included his original statement]
I'll give credit to DMB for admitting and demonstrating with quotes 
that the hippie revolution was as much against intellectuals as it 
was against social values...

[DMB]
Platt is pretending to correct an error that never existed.

[Arlo]
Well this is just talk-radio, Fox News style rhetoric. What's funny 
to me is that he didn't even bother to erase his former words when he 
altered his stance but one post later. Normally, I'd expect a good 
two post buffer before we'd see this.

[DMB]
To say they're incoherent would be too generous.

[Arlo]
And wrong. Incoherence implies the lack of a strategy. What appears 
as "incoherence" is simply the strategy to distort and distract. On 
that note, like you, I'm not going to give that more than it deserves 
here. There is a high quality dialogue to be had on the thoughts, 
views and direction of the early hippie movement, say 1956-1965). 
More on this to come...

Now onto your substantive points from before Platt's moronic distractions...

[DMB]
It wouldn't be changing the subject to point out that Pirsig's 
diagnosis of the hippie's failure applies to political economics as well.

[Arlo]
Absolutely. Indeed, the Hippie movement was as much as response to 
"politics" and "economics" as it was to other social/intellectual 
structures, and I'd add to emphasize this, the "modes of production" 
as pointed to ZMM. The word "mass" is something the Hippies revolted 
against, which John points out in his recent post. Mass production. 
Mass consumption. Mass marketing. Mass thinking.

[DMB]
As you may have noticed, I think it applies to the world of the fine 
arts as well.

[Arlo]
Agree. I think one thing noticeable about early Hippie thinking (I 
like how that sounds) is that they saw Pirsig's re-uniting of "art" 
with everyday activity in a way that the larger culture did not 
(still does not). We could talk a lot about Andy Warhol, but I think 
his "selling out" of art to capitalism was more a statement against 
the "divorce" of art from human activity than a glorification of mass 
consumption. On a side note, I continue to think that it remains our 
biggest challenge to do away with words like "artist" as applied to 
certain domains (painting, sculpting, dance, music, etc.) and see the 
"artist" from a Pirsigian (and Hippie) view that the label "artist" 
should apply to anyone doing high-quality activity (from building 
rotisseries, to gardening, to fixing motorcycles, to whatever).

[DMB]
In the next moral revolution, if it is to be successful, there will 
be spirituality where there once was hedonism because the confusion 
between Dynamic Quality and biological static quality will be gone.

[Arlo]
Agree. I think of the Peyote Experience of Pirsig as a good exemplar. 
Here, the activity was "spiritual". It was not hedonistic. Pirsig 
called it "de-hallucinating" and I think, given that it acted as a 
catalyst for his formuation of the MOQ, he was correct. But there is 
a world of difference between this and the over-indulgent "blow your 
mind" hedonism that followed. What was missing was a way to 
understand that experience in Dynamic terms rather than simply 
biological ones. And that (I think John made this point, if I 
understood) led to pursuing "trips" not to "de-hallucinate" but to 
"feel good".

[DMB]
And I suppose that same negative attitude also applies to industrial, 
institutional and commercial architecture, to our factory-like 
educational system and scientific materialism in general.

[Arlo]
Yes, for sure. And this is where I think going back to Wolfe, Kenesy, 
Kerouac, Lennon, Thompson, and others who rode this early wave is 
very valuable.

"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. That is 
the soul of this place. Blind, huge, sinister and inhuman: seen by 
the light of fire flaring upward in the night from the blast furnaces 
in the south, through heavy coal smoke deeper and denser into the 
neon of BEER and PIZZA and LAUNDROMAT signs and unknown and 
meaningless signs along meaningless straight streets going off into 
other straight streets forever. ... Along the streets that lead away 
from the apartment he can never see anything through the concrete and 
brick and neon 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)