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Last updated: 23 December 1998
Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and
a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution,
in its struggle to become free of the social level, has ignored the social
level's role in keeping the biological level under control. We must understand that when a society undermines intellectual freedom
for its own purposes it is absolutely morally bad, but when it represses
biological freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally good. Objects are inorganic and biological values; subjects are social and
intellectual values. New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there. Communism and socialism, programs for intellectual control over society
... fascism, a program for the social control of intellect. Only social patterns can control biological patterns, and the instrument
of conversation between society and biology is not words. The instrument
of conversation between society and biology has always been a policeman
or a soldier and his gun. If you don't generalize you don't philosophize. The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to
move around. Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected.
Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not. Cultures are not the source of all morals, only a limited set of morals.
Cultures can be graded and judged morally according to their contribution
to the evolution of life. The thing 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. If you don't like our present social system or
intellectual system the best thing you can do with either cops or psychiatrists
is stay out of their way. You leave them till last. It's better to live with a sad truth than with all the happy progress
talk you get up here in the North. Substance is a subspecies of value. When you reverse the containment
process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears:
substance is a "stable pattern of inorganic values." The problem
then disappears. The world of objects and the world of values is unified. The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we
would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do. A thing that has no value does not exist. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand page
menu and no food. Between the subject and the object lies the value. Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual
patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality
they describe. It's not the "nice" guy who brings about real social change.
"Nice" guys look nice because they're conforming. It's the "bad"
guys, who only look nice a hundred years later, that are the real Dynamic
force in social evolution. Morality is not a simple set of rules. It's a very complex struggle
of conflicting patterns of values. This conflict is the residue of evolution.
As new patters evolve they come into conflict with old ones. Each stage
of evolution creates in its wake a wash of problems. One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law
of gravity. One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys
this law is a measure of its degree of evolution. The only difference between causation and the value is that the word
"cause" implies absolute certainty whereas the implied meaning
of "value" is one of preference. In classical science it was
supposed that the world always works in terms of absolute certainty and
that "cause" is the more appropriate word to describe it. But
in modern quantum physics all that is changed. Particles "prefer"
to do what they do. An individual particle is not absolutely committed
to one predictable behavior. What appears to be an absolute cause is just
a very consistent pattern of preferences. Science values static patterns.
 
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