[MD] to claim people had no "intellect"

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
... I think it's pretty clear that Pol Pot, for example, depopulated the cities sending everyone into the jungle and back to the stone age, was not guided by intellect.

John replied:

 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.


dmb says:

Your reasoning here is a bit wacky. Depopulating the cities and sending everyone out to live in the jungle is an act of killing social and intellectual values. Except for the fact that these people took their language and memories with them, he practically reduced thing to a biological level. Seems pretty obvious to me that the whole thing was motivated by some profoundly anti-intellectual attitudes. To say those views were intellectual just because he "thought" it was a good idea to kill a ton of people is more than a little ridiculous. That's a bit like saying the NAZI project of genocide was intellectual because anti-semitic attitudes had been expressed in books or because the trains that took the victims to the camps were designed by engineers. Obviously that horror was predicated on a kind of tribal racism, not intellectual values. In this case too, these crimes were motivated by some profoundly anti-intellectual attitudes. For the most part this was a re-assertion of German social level values but they also had a substantial back-to-nature impulse running through it. 

The socialism that Pirsig is talking about is the kind of thing you find in Norway, Canada, France and the UK. In the United States, socialism can be seen in things like FDR's New Deal, Johnson's Great Society. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the post office, public schools and the interstate highway system are the products of socialism. Does that resemble the killing fields or the gas chambers in any way? No, of course not. 

But 63% of self-identified Republicans think Obama is a socialist and a lot of them are not thinking of Canada when they call him that. These confusions and distortions are really quite debilitating in our public debates and in this forum. It gets so warped around here that some people (John) can see mass murder and the deliberate collapse of a civilization as an intellectual act. Man, that's really mixed up. 






 		 	   		  
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