Metaphysics of Quality

I think that at the bottom of the rabbit hole is what we might think of as a "pre-intellectual awareness" and that it is upon this that our unthinking judgements as to Quality, Truth, Value, Beauty and so on are based.

None of these facets of a non-dual Reality are definable - there is no absolute basis....

CHOMSKY:
   Well, here I really disagree. I think there is some sort of an absolute basis--if you press me too hard I'll be in trouble, because I can't sketch it out-ultimately residing in fundamental human qualities, in terms of which a "real" notion of justice is grounded.

   I think it's too hasty to characterise our existing systems of justice as merely systems of class oppression; I don't think that they are that. I think that they embody systems of class oppression and elements of other kinds of oppression, but they also embody a kind of groping towards the true humanly, valuable concepts of justice and decency and love and kindness and sympathy, which I think are real.

.... because everything is definable only in relative terms.

As the physicist John A Wheeler said:

"Reality is defined by the questions that you put to it".

Loy's point (that repression of our basic awareness that there's no ego, no subject-object division, no duality, explains our craving for all things unsustainable) descends deeper in the hole (see a previous posting).

This is exactly where Pirsig found his Metaphysics, although his analogy was not a descent into a rabbit hole but a climb into the rarefied atmosphere of mountainous summits of abstractions and intellect.

Moreover, I believe that in distinguishing a Metaphysics of Quality from a post-Socrates "Subject/Object Metaphysics" he saw the nature of both the gains and the losses we have achieved from taking the path of Reason we embarked upon 2,000 years ago

And now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost.

He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth-but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it.

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

So I think that we can identify Greenspan's mistaken Truths only through questioning his assumptions, and of course, as you imply, the nature of the web of rhetoric with which he imprisoned us all.

Look at Greenspan's truth, which coincided for decades with those of academia, business schools, the rich and famous. Forming identities of people striving to participate in the good life. Forming the Procrustus bed countries were measured with and treated according to? How much suffering was induced with the best of intentions? Or not so good intentions? This turns out to be an, ehh, mistake? Newspeak anyone?

For sure we have all been prisoners of the NewSpeak rhetoric used by Greenspan and the MSM. When we define "Public" as State; "Private" as "Corporate"; "Money as "Debt" and "Wealth" as "a claim over wealth issued ex nihilo by a Bank" then we should not be surprised at the results we get.

In relation to Foucault and the "Panopticum" I think that the fact that a prison or a Society has a capability for surveillance built into it is very different from saying that this capability may feasibly be used.

By way of example, in my days as Compliance Director at the International Petroleum Exchange, the first thing I did was have video surveillance and microphones installed in the trading pits, and all of the hundreds of telephones taped.

This was over the brokers' dead bodies of course.

But within a week they realised that this was the best quality control mechanism they could have - it got rid of trading disputes overnight - and 99% of the system use was not by Big Brother (me) but by them.

I was already aware in installing it that in terms of surveillance it was no use at all to me or anyone else to monitor real time.

This was because without knowledge of the customer orders being executed I had no context.  So my methodology was always ("Follow the Money") to start with the accounts of traders who were entirely too consistently profitable, work back to find out exactly whose orders they were abusing, and then present the video tapes merely as audit trail evidence.

What I am getting to here is that there is infinitely too much data around for a genuine surveillance society, and that actually monitoring even one individual requires not just one, but many individuals, and even then they will need the context for the surveillance to mke sense of it.

So when asked to choose between Conspiracy and Cock-Up I go for the latter, every time.

"Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky