Excerpts From The book Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, By Robert Pirsig What went wrong with the Hippie movement? But the 60's revolution made a mistake. The hippie rejection of social and intellectual patterns left only two directions to go : toward biological quality and toward dynamic quality. The hippies thought biological and dynamic quality were the same thing. When biological quality and dynamic quality are confused , the result isn't an increase in dynamic quality: it is an extremely destructive degeneracy of the sorts of the Manson's murder, the Jones town madness, and increased crime and drug addiction. The reasons of Moral Bankruptcy Today the overall picture is one of moral movements gone bankrupt. Just as the intellectual revolution undermines social patters the hippies undermine both static and intellectual patters. The result has been in a drop of both social and intellectual quality. In the US the intelligence level shown in SAT score has gone down; organized crime has grown more powerful and more sinister. What is coming out of the urban slams where Victorian moral codes are almost destroyed, isn't the paradise the revolutionaries hoped for , but a reversion to rule by terror. The old biological might-makes-right morality of prehistoric brigandage. The end of the 20th century in America seems to be an intellectual social and economical rustbelt. A whole society that is giving up on dynamic improvement and is slowly trying to slip back to Victorianism, the last static ratchet-latch. It is the intellectual pattern of amoral objectivity which is to blame for the social deterioration of America. Because it has undermined the static social values necessary to prevent deterioration . In its condemnation of social repression as the enemy of liberty. It has never come forth with a single moral principle that distinguishes a Galileo fighting social repression from a common criminal fighting social repression. It has as a result been the champion of both. This is the root of the problem. Technological Dream, Moral Nightmare: Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise in a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution in its struggle to become free of social level, has ignored the social level 's role in keeping the biological level under control. The intellectual s have failed to understand the ocean of biological quality that is constantly being suppressed by social order. Biological quality is necessary to the survival of life, but when it threatens to dominate and destroy society it becomes evil. The metaphysics of quality indicates that the 20th century intellectual faith in man's basic goodness, as spontaneous and natural, is disastrously naive. The ideal of an harmonious society in which everyone without coercion cooperates happily with everyone else for the mutual good of all is a devastating fiction. The mythology by which the puritans explained the original sin seems no longer useful in a scientific world. But when we look at the things they identified with this original sin, we see something remarkable: Dancing, drinking, sex, playing the fiddle, gambling, idleness.. which are all biological pleasures. Early puritan morals were largely a suppression of biological quality. The metaphysics of quality concludes that the old puritan and Victorian social codes should not be followed blindly, but should not be attacked blindly either. We must understand that when a society undermines intellectual freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally bad. But when it represses biological for its own purposes it is absolutely morally good. The idea that biological crimes can be ended by intellect alone, that you can talk crime to death doesn't work. Intellectual patterns cannot control directly biological patterns. Only social patterns can control biological patterns. And the instrument of conversation between society and biology has always a policeman and his gun. On Insanity: Insanity is an important philosophical subject which has been ignored mainly because of metaphysical limitations. As long as you are stuck with old conventions insanity is a misunderstand of the object by the subject . The object is real, the subject is mistaken. The problem is to change the subject's mind back to a correct comprehension of objective reality. With the metaphysics of quality, the empirical experience is not an experience of objects, it is an experience of value patterns produced by a number of sources not just inorganic. When an insane person , or an hypnotized person or a person from a primitive culture advances some explanation of the universe that is completely ad odds with current scientific reality. We do not have to believe he has jumped the empirical world. He is just valuing intellectual patterns which because they are outside the range of our own culture we perceive to have low quality. Some force has altered his judgment of quality. It has caused him to filter out our cultural intellectual patterns just as ruthlessly as our culture filters out his. Ask if there was only one person in the world, is there any way he could be insane? Insanity always exists in relations to others. It s a social and intellectual deviation, not a biological deviation. The only test for insanity in a court of law, is conformity to a cultural status quo. That is why the psychiatric profession bears such a resemblance to priest saving heretics. Both use physical restraint and abuse as ways of enforcing status quo. Like police who live in two worlds the biological and the social, psychiatrists live in two worlds, the social and intellectual . like cops they are in absolute control of the lower order and absolutely subservient to the upper order. You have as much chance convincing a psychiatrists that the intellectual order he enforces is rotten as you have of convincing a cop that the social order he supports is rotten. Somebody has to deal with the degenerate forms of intellect. The think to understand is that if you are going to reform society, you don't start with cops, and if you are going to reform intellect you don't start with psychiatrists. It you don't like our present social or intellectual order , the best you can do with cops or psychiatrists is stay out of their way. You leave them till last. Who do you start with then? Anthropologists? An anthropologist could study the person's complaints, find a culture where the complaints were relieved or unnoticeable, and send them there. If a person suffers from sexual inhibition he could be sent to Margaret Mead's Samoa. If he suffered from paranoia, send him to one of the middle eastern countries where suspicious attitudes are normal. Each culture presumes its believes correspond to external reality, but a geography of religious beliefs shows that this external reality can just be any damn thing. Even the facts that people observe to confirm the truth depended on the culture they live in. And all cultural intellectual patterns are build on facts that are extremely selective. When a new fact doesn't fit a pattern, we don't throw out the pattern, we throw out the fact. A contradictory fact has to keep hammering and hammering, sometimes for centuries before may be one or two individuals will see it. Then these one or two have to start hammering on others for a long time before they see it too. Just a biological immune system will destroy a life saving skin graft with the same vigor with which it fights pneumonia, so will a cultural immune system fight off a beneficial new kind of understanding with the same vigor it uses to destroy crime. Continue