Robert Pirsig - Lila. An Inquiry Into Morals

The trouble was, he didn’t really like that solution much better than the first.

The question isn’t What makes people insane? It’s What makes people sane? People have been asking for centuries how to deal with the insane and he didn’t see that they’d gotten anywhere. The way to really deal with insanity, he thought, is to turn the tables and talk about truth instead. Insanity’s a medical subject that everyone agrees is bad. Truth’s a metaphysical subject that everyone disagrees about. There are lots of different definitions of truth and some of them could throw a whole lot more light on what was happening to Lila than a subject-object metaphysics does.

If objects are the ultimate reality then there’s only one true intellectual construction of things: that which corresponds to the objective world. But if truth is defined as a high-quality set of intellectual value patterns, then insanity can be defined as just a low-quality set of intellectual value patterns, and you get a whole different picture of it.

When the culture asks, Why doesn’t this person see things the way we do? you can answer that he doesn’t see them because he doesn’t value them. He’s gone into illegal value patterns because the illegal patterns resolve value conflicts that the culture’s unable to handle. The causes of insanity may be all kinds of things, from chemical imbalances to social conflicts. But insanity has solved these conflicts with illegal patterns which appear to be of higher quality.

Lila seems to be in some kind of trance-like state up there but what does that mean? In a subject-object world, trance and hypnosis are big-time platypi. That’s why there’s this prejudice that while hypnosis and trance can’t be denied, there’s something wrong about them. They’re best nudged as close as possible to the empirical trash heap called the occult and left to that anti-empirical crowd that indulges in astrology, Tarot cards, the I-Ching and the like. If seeing is believing then hypnosis and trance should be impossible. But since they do exist, what you have is an empirically observable case of empiricism being overthrown.

The irony is that there are times when the culture actually fosters trance and hypnosis to further its purposes. The theater’s a form of hypnosis. So are movies and TV. When you enter a movie theater you know that all you’re going to see is twenty-four shadows per second flashed on a screen to give an illusion of moving people and objects. Yet despite this knowledge you laugh when the twenty-four shadows per second tell jokes and cry when the shadows show actors faking death. You know they are an illusion yet you enter the illusion and become a part of it and while the illusion is taking place you are not aware that it is an illusion. This is hypnosis. It is trance. It’s also a form of temporary insanity. But it’s also a powerful force for cultural reinforcement and for this reason the culture promotes movies and censors them for its own benefit.

Phædrus thought that in the case of permanent insanity the exits to the theater have been blocked, usually because of the knowledge that the show outside is so much worse. The insane person is running a private unapproved film which he happens to like better than the current cultural one. If you want him to run the film everyone else is seeing, the solution would be to find ways to prove to him that it would be valuable to do so, Phædrus thought. Otherwise why should he get better ? He already is better. It’s the patterns that constitute betterness that are at issue. From an internal point of view insanity isn’t the problem. Insanity is the solution.

What it would take that’s more valuable to Lila, Phædrus wasn’t sure.

He finished his sandwich, put away the food and cleared off his plate in the sink. He guessed the next thing to worry about would be that engine, and why it was overheating.

If he was lucky it would be something caught in or over the through-hull water intake for the engine cooling system. If he was unlucky it would be that something had clogged up in the water passages inside the engine itself. That would mean taking the cylinder heads off and fishing through the heads and jackets to find it. The thought of that was awful. Really stupid, when he bought the boat, not to have bought a freshwater cooling system that would have prevented the second possibility.

You can’t think of everything.

Up on deck he raised the dinghy with the mast halyard, held it suspended over the side of the boat and lowered it gently so that its transom didn’t go under. Then he got in, unsnapped it from the halyard, and by hand-over-handing along the boat gunwale, worked it to the stern of the boat.

He took off his shirt, lay flat in the dinghy and reached down with his hand into the water until it almost was up to his shoulder. It was cold! He felt around but there didn’t seem to be plastic bags or other debris covering the engine intake. Bad news. He pulled his arm back up again and wiped it dry on his shirt.

He supposed whatever it was could have dropped off after the engine stopped, while he was sailing. He should have run the engine for a while before he got into the dinghy to see if it was still happening. You always think of these things too late. Too much other stuff on his mind.

He tied the dinghy to a stanchion and got aboard. He went back to the cockpit and started the engine. While it was warming up he began to think about Lila again.

She’s what you could call a contrarian. You’re a loner, just like me, she had said the day they left Kingston. That stuck in his mind because it was true. But what she meant by it was not just someone who’s alone, but a contrarian, someone who’s always doing everything the wrong way, just out of pure willfulness, it would seem.

Contrarians sometimes just seem to savagely attack every kind of static moral pattern they can find. It seems as though they’re trying to destroy morality as a kind of revenge.

He’d gotten that word out of his anthropology reading. It indicated there’s more to contrarians than just individual wrongness. It’s common to many cultures. That brujo in Zuni was a contrarian. The Cheyenne had a whole society of contrarians to assimilate the phenomenon within their social fabric. Cheyenne contrarians rode their horses sitting backward, entered teepees backward, and had a whole repertoire of things they performed in a contrary way. Members seemed to enter the contrary society when they felt a great wrong, a great injustice, had been done to them and apparently it was felt that this was a way of resolving the injustice.

Once you see it in another culture like that and then come back to our own you can see that in an unofficial way we have our contrarian societies too. The Bohemians of the Victorian era were contrarians. So, to some extent, were the Hippies of the sixties… The engine didn’t seem to be overheating now. Maybe the problem was gone?… Hah — not very likely… Probably it was just because the engine was in neutral and wasn’t working very hard. Phædrus shifted into reverse to let it tug against the anchor for a while. He waited and watched the temperature dial.

Anyway, it seemed to him that when you add a concept of Dynamic Quality to a rational understanding of the world, you can add a lot to an understanding of contrarians. Some of them aren’t just being negative toward static moral patterns, they are actively pursuing a Dynamic goal.

Everybody gets on these negative contrarian streaks from time to time, where no matter what it is they’re supposed to be doing, that’s the one thing they least want to do. Sometimes it’s a degenerative negativism, where biological forces are driving it. Sometimes it’s an ego pattern that says, I’m too important to be doing all this dumb static stuff.