[MD] Problems with Intellectual control of Society

[plattholden at gmail.com]

On 12 Oct 2009 at 17:04, Andre Broersen wrote:

> Platt to Andre:
> But intellect has proven it's inability to become God and create heaven on
> earth. In fact just the opposite. When given control of society It has
> created hell.
> 
> Andre:
> Right Platt and surely Pirsig sought and found the source. In this sense I
> suppose I am going to beg the question: since the MoQ can explain reality in
> a much better way, can it also be used as a guide (to improve the world in
> which we live)?

Platt
As far as I know the following passage from ZAMM expresses how 
Pirsig would answer your question. As you can see, he was for two 
minds. So take your choice.

I think the first is the more useful guide. To me it explains how America 
became the world's leading nation, although beginning in the '60s it 
slowly began to lose its exceptionalism for reasons Pirsig's describes in 
Lila, mostly having to do with intellect downplaying the role of society to 
keep biological quality under control.  

Pirsig
"My personal feeling is that this is how any further 
improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making 
Quality decisions and that´s all. God, I don´t want to have any 
more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for 
big masses of people that leave individual Quality out. These 
can be left alone for a while. There´s a place for them but 
they´ve got to be built on a foundation of Quality within the 
individuals involved. We´ve had that individual Quality in the 
past, exploited it as a natural resource without knowing it, and 
now it´s just about depleted. Everyone´s just about out of 
gumption. And I think it´s about time to return to the 
rebuilding of this American resource...individual worth. There 
are political reactionaries who´ve been saying something close 
to this for years. I´m not one of them, but to the extent 
they´re talking about real individual worth and not just an 
excuse for giving more money to the rich, they´re right. We do 
need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance and old-
fashioned gumption. We really do. I hope that in this 
Chautauqua some directions have been pointed to.
Phædrus went a different path from the idea of individual, 
personal Quality decisions. I think it was a wrong one, but 
perhaps if I were in his circumstances I would go his way too. 
He felt that the solution started with a new philosophy, or he 
saw it as even broader than that...a new spiritual 
rationality...in which the ugliness and the loneliness and the 
spiritual blankness of dualistic technological reason would 
become illogical. Reason was no longer to be "value free." 
Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality, and he 
was sure he would find the cause of its not being so back 
among the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our 
culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of our 
technology, the tendency to do what is "reasonable" even 
when it isn´t any good. That was the root of the whole thing. 
Right there. I said a long time ago that he was in pursuit of 
the ghost of reason. This is what I meant. Reason and Quality 
had become separated and in conflict with each other and 
Quality had been forced under and reason made supreme 
somewhere back then."