[MD] to claim people had no "intellect"

[John Carl]

I think you're right there, DmB,



> dmb says:
>
> Yea, I'm glad you mentioned that. Pirsig's diagnosis makes much more sense
> if you understand what socialism actually is.


What is socialism anyway?  Is it a social pattern or an intellectual one?


> The tyrannical and genocidal actions of dictators hardly counts as
> socialism. I realize this is a very common misconception but I think it's
> pretty clear that Pol Pot, for example, who sent depopulated the cities
> sending everyone into the jungle and back to the stone age, was not guided
> by intellect.


I sorta thought he'd been infected by some intellectual ideas that made it
necessary to do that big etch-a-sketch thing where you reformulate your
society by shaking it while upside down, totally destroying all existing
patterns so that the new order could arise.  And it's more moral for some
intellectual patterns to completely kill a society than it is for a society
to kill intellectual patterns.  So he was actually doing a good thing,
according to the morality of hierarchical levels.