[MD] e: Reading & Comprehension

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[Mary]
Non-Western cultures are SOM-based too.  Just as "guilty" of emersion in the
subject-object paradigm. 

[Arlo]
This was my initial point; Pirsig's highest moral order becomes an obstacle, a
problem, a hinderance, in an otherwise harmonic "inorganic-biological-social"
trajectory of bliss. Intellect is reduced to a malady-of-sorts, something
patterns are "guilty" of.

Again, I think the problem is confusing the "subjects" and "objects" of grammar
with SOM to make anything handled by linguistic-symbol manipulation "SOM". 

SOM is a particular species of intellect that begins with holding the S/O
divide as primary. Patterns emanating from this primacy, then, are the species
of intellect Pirsig refers to as SOM. Not ALL thought, and certainly not ALL
cultures, hold this S/O primacy.

Indeed, Pirsig makes the point that this S/O intellect dominance in Western
thought is traceable to the Ancient Greeks. He "blames" Aristotle for for this,
which please note that if intellect was ipso facto "SOM", there would be
nothing to blame Aristotle for. 

[Mary]
The MoQ is as SOM as SOM can be.  It can be nothing else.  It's not in a higher
level or a separate one.

[Arlo]
Yeah, this is the end-result of thinking the entirety of the intellectual is
SOM. The MOQ is NOT derived from the primacy of the S/O split, and is thus NOT
SOM.

[Arlo previously]
The SOL view offers us neither.

[Mary]
For many ways, the necessary morass of "intelligence and intellect are
different things", the reduction of the MOQ's highest moral level to a
"problem" in an otherwise harmonic being, the elevation of the West alone as
"intellect" and the dismissing of non-West culture as morally inferior "social"
people, for starters.