Lila An Inquiry Into Morals By Robert Pirsig

Some extracts, and interpretations from Lila.

* LILA

- [consistency] You can't have Box 'A' contain within itself Box 'B', which in turn contains Box 'A'. That's whacko.

- all is based on dualities such as the static-dynamic, romantic-classic, wave-particle

- Quality, on which there is complete agreement, is a universal source of things. The objects about which people disagree are merely transitory

- static patterns of value evolve toward a Dynamic Quality

- life is a migration of static patterns of quality toward Dynamic Quality [like a ratchet / static latching]

- fascism, a program for the social control of intellect

- Morals have no objective reality

- The fundamental purpose of knowledge is to Dynamically improve and preserve society

- There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing

- the primal reality from which subjects and objects spring is value, value unites pragmatism and radical empiricism into a single fabric

- dhyana is an emptying out of all the static clutter and junk of one's life and just settling into an undefined sort of tranquility

- dharma includes both static and Dynamic Quality without contradiction

- we don't perform religious rituals because we believe in God. We believe in God because we perform religious rituals.

- Another immoral way of killing the static patterns is to pass the patterns to someone else a ‘karma dump’ you invent a devil group, Jews or blacks or whites or capitalists then say that group is responsible for all your suffering. [jf: activist blaming others, feminists blaming man, environmentalists blaming technology, pacifist blaming army...]

- If you take all this karmic garbage and make yourself feel better by passing it on to others that's normal. That's the way the world works. But if you manage to absorb it and not pass it on, that's the highest moral conduct of all. That really advances everything, not just you. The whole world. If you look at the lives of some of the great moral figures of history — Christ, Lincoln, Gandhi and others - you'll see that that's what they were really involved in, the cleansing of the world through the absorption of karmic garbage. They didn't pass it on. Their followers sometimes did, but they didn't.

- So today we have a theory of evolution in which man is ruthlessly controlled by cause-and-effect laws of the universe while the particles of his body are not. The absurdity of this seems to be neglected. Physicists can ignore it they are not concerned with man. Social scientists can ignore it because they are not concerned with subatomic particles. [jf: theory of evolution vs quantum mechanics]

- in house built is better quality because there are less 'administration layers-systems' with their different agendas and profit center

- quality is the highest possible priority but it is also an entity limited by available resources and subject to a group's zero sum [the more for one the less for the others]

- quality vs management by objectives: creates frustration when MBO is used as a risk transfer tool; people resent the compromising of quality for the objectives of others.

- for example BA subcontracting IT services to CGI's 'IT help desk'; MPE used to have an employee dedicated to the department, when we had a problem he came over and stayed untill it was fixed; now when we have a problem we call a help desk that in most cases cannot fix anything all they do is refer the problem to a busy specialist who is supposedly overwhelmed, you cannot wait for him and have the problem fixed the same day, the result is that it can take weeks and many help desk calls before a problem is fixed, here the objective is not the maximize the user satisfaction or productivity but rather to maximize the number of call to CGI and thereby maximize their profit, so CGI uses its employees lack of skills to maximize its profits because you have to keep on calling back and open new 'tickets' che-ching-che-ching; why would a company want to do that ? ref: installation of draftsight.

- Quality is continuity; for example when IT support does not close a ticket but instead 'refers' it to someone else, and weeks later the issue is not resolved, then that is non quality, your time and productivity is wasted so that someone else can increase tehir profit, the reason they make money is that they should have had a person capable of closing the issue in the first place. Quality and Greed are two opposites, like safety and winning a competition.

The dichotomy of Quality: Quality's evil twin is greed.