Quality - Freedom and Safety

Morality comes down to these elements

This space that I’ve ended up in, and I think other Pirsigians have as well, wants to examine the deficits of materialism, of enlightenment thinking, of classic rationality, is a desire to find some kind of moral unity - moral law if you will. So people are combing back through religion, through ancient ways of thinking, to get to some kind of certainty about morality.

But is morality certain? Modernity would tell you definitely not. It’s relative based on culture, or identity. But what would we say in the Pirsigsphere?

I think we’d say It is a deep understanding that has to do with all 3 levels of our existence - biological, social and intellectual. So in that case, morality is (and Pirsig has said this in so many ways) a balance of the needs of all 3 levels. So what can all 3 levels agree on? Well, they all want: Freedom and Security. Let’s look back at Lila a bit - inorganic molecules want the freedom of complexity and the security of molecular stability, Birds want to overcome gravity, and escape predators, ideas want to be both entirely original and set down in the annals.

If you think about it, these are the basic needs and desires of everything in the universe. Is all morality is based on the presence of these two elements? Well, it is immoral to restrict freedom. It’s also immoral to threaten safety. Good enough. However, the conjugate of these two moral principles causes a problem. Freedom often means you have to sacrifice safety and vice versa. So what to do about that?

So one way of looking at Quality is through the lens of equilibrium of these two elements. The highest Quality situation is one of both enough freedom and safety to breathe. This is why the United States and Democracy for example were so revered for so long. Because our motto “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” implies that state of being. Life=safety liberty=freedom pursuit of happiness=having the space to pursue Quality.

But as this example demonstrates, maintaining that equilibrium is impossible. What nature must contend with is morality is fleeting. Times in which the something that comes close to the ideal state come and go. The rains bring plenty of nutrition yielding freedom to grow and the drought negates all of that.

Anyway, I understand that I’m not really saying anything new that there is a delicate balance between these two aspects of experience, nor do I think that there’s anything revolutionary in the Pirsigsphere - I’m really just reiterating something that Pirsig says again and again…that sometimes channels need to be cut deeper when they become too shallow etc. and that there is a geometry to the universe of constant creation and destruction.

But the point I am trying to make is that Freedom and Security, or Safety, is something that might be useful is using these words to conceptualize some of the dynamics of MoQ. AND, because Lila is an inquiry into morals then these two concepts might be what morals can be reduced to. I understand Haidt has categorized into 6 levels of morality, but when we are trying to simplify things, and in metaphysics the most simple and useful conception is a conjugate pair, then I might reduce not just morality, but all aspects of this particular metaphysics to this dyad as some kind of alternate conception to SQ/DQ.