[MD] humpty dumpty

[ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR]

[DMB]
Activity aimed at mere conformity, motivated by personal ambitions or self-aggrandizement is ego-centered action and, if Pirsig is right, it will very likely end in disaster or some other kind of wrongness. 

[Arlo]
Well, for what its worth, I think this is where I brought Peirce's essay into this. Restated briefly, I'd say that belief grounded in tenacity, authority or a priori (which I map, more or less, to biological, social and S/O intellect) is what guides activity that will, as you say, very likely end in disaster or wrongness.

I think Peirce would say that activity is impossible without 'belief'. From that primary, immediate, foundational ground of experience, we derive 'belief' which allows us to move outside the immediate NOW! moment and act with deliberation. Activity, thus, is more than just 'response', I don't think Peirce would consider an amoeba's pulling away from acid as 'activity', in the sense that 'activity' is purposeful in the sense that it has a 'goal' or future expected state projected from a recognized/represented history.

In ZMM, for example, when comparing the author's 'belief' in the functioning/continuity of his motorcycle, we could say that Phaedrus has 'fixed' his belief on the motorcycle on 'inquiry', whereas John has 'fixed' his on 'authority' (in the sense that he 'believes' the BMW to be the most reliable bike on the road, and for this reason does not bother to the daily maintenance Pirsig's 'inquiry'-based belief entails). We see another example of a divergent 'fix' between the two when the author discusses the electric light switch. Pirsig responds to this through the mode of 'inquiry', whereas John has 'fixed' his belief on 'a priori' reason ('logic' that tells him where the problem must be), ungrounded in experience, which derails his initiatives to fix the light. A final example, is the beer-can shim, which produces a psychologically uneasy feeling in John and so his response is a tenacious denial and affirmation that "a beer can can't possibly fix my bike", a refusal to even entertain the idea, and finally avoidance of the topic entirely. In all cases, we see the author deploy what Peirce advanced as inquiry (again, in the pragmatic, experientially-rooted and experientially-guided sense) which leads to successful activity (goals are achieved).