[MD] [LS:9743] The social level.

[david]

Arlo said:

As Bo has refused to stop hounding my personal email, I thought I'd make this response public. ...And then I went to Google groups and read the the posts to LilaSquad. ...What a bunch of incoherent, unintelligible, and outright moronic nonsense. The majority of contributors appear to be schizophrenics who've gone off their lithium. I am not exaggerating here... Horse and DMB (anyone else with a functioning frontal lobe), if you haven't you simply must check this out: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lilasquad



dmb says:

Yes, I'm aware and it really is as bad as you say. You're not exaggerating. I still have at least two cyber-stalkers from that particular nuthouse, including Bo, even though I've repeatedly asked them to leave me alone. 

Every celebrity gets their fair share of psychotic fans, I suppose, but Pirsig gets way more than his fair share. I guess that's because Phaedrus is brilliant, heroic, and insane (sort of). It seems to celebrate the misunderstood genius, which makes for a much better self-image than the medically diagnosed guy with average intelligence. I mean, it's easy to understand and to sympathize with them as afflicted souls - but that certainly doesn't mean their philosophy is worthy of the name. 

I go swimming in larger ponds and sadly, this kind of mental illness is fairly common. I see it almost every day and I have to remove someone from a philosophy forum several times each week because of it. Many of them are "religious" in bizarre or fanatical ways. It's pretty depressing, just as you'd imagine.