[MD] Problems with Intellectual control of Society

[Andre Broersen]

Platt:
Yeah, locker room humor is so hilarious -- to randy teenagers perhaps.
What's really funny is trashing talk radio although rarely listening to it.
What bothers the trashers here are the conservative principles of limited
government,

Andre:
>From my observation here Platt (i.e.Holland) is that some wonderful
American capitalist boys, through their greed and insatiable hunger for
power and control have managed to unleash a world wide economic and
financial crisis affecting/ ruining the lives of billions of people.Losing
their homes, jobs, security, dignity, liberty, life-long savings etc, etc.
The Arts are affected, education, health, you name it.

It has caused huge problems requiring huge interventions. Governments around
the globe have done so and are still doing it because it ain't over yet.
Should governments have done nothing, as you seem to advocate...and let
everything go down the drain?
The social consequences would have been catastrophic and we would have been
back at the biological level: the law of the jungle.

Last Saturday I read in the paper that there are currently 3 million
homeless people in the U.S. and 9.8 percent of your fellow countrymen are
jobless (15.1 million).
Are you going to tell me that that is the fault of themselves? of their
government?

Wake up man!

You continue:
individual liberty, private property and Pirsig's endorsement of capitalism,

Andre:
Pirsig endorses free enterprise only because it is more dynamic...and
mindless. I do not think he endorses the latter. And, eventhough he has
claimed that capitalism/ free enterprise has made everybody richer, I feel
this is an exaggeration and not quite in line with the data which states
that at present there are one billion people (!) going hungry every day.
And, let's not muck around,he still finds an intellectually guided society
morally superior... and a capitalist/free market system is not
intellectually guided.

The individual liberty and private property ideas you talk about I have
already mentioned in previous posts: they are based on an out-dated Lockean
conception of 'nature'.

Furthermore:
not to mention his advice in ZMM to rely on individuals making quality
decisions to improve the the quality of life, not big programs full of
social spending like Obozo and his fellow leftists propose.

Andre:
I addressed the latter above. And yeah, individual quality decisions. 'Ask
not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country'
seems to sum it up pretty well for me. Not only thinking for yourself but
following your own dharma which strives towards DQ which represents the
fundamental unity, harmony and beauty of all for all.

But this, for you Platt, is 'lefty' prose. Pirsig is a 'lefty' as far as
this is concerned.You don't want to make the world a better place. You just
want a better place for you in the world.