This post contains excerpts from Robert Pirsig's book Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals.
The words are all his, the editing choices are all mine, the consequences of reading are all yours.
Contrarians
Contrarians sometimes just seem to savagely attack every kind of static moral pattern they can find … as though … a kind of revenge … The Cheyenne had a whole society of contrarians to assimilate the phenomenon within their social fabric … [they] rode their horses sitting backward, entered teepees backward … 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.
… When u 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 … negative contrarian streaks … sometimes it’s a degenerative negativism … sometimes an ego pattern … sometimes a static pattern of it’s own …
But sometimes it’s Dynamic, where your whole being senses that the static situation is an enemy of life itself. That’s what drives the really creative people … the feeling that if they don’t break out of this jail-house … they’re going to die. They’re way too energetic and aggressive to be decadent. They’re fighting for some kind of Dynamic freedom from the static patterns … It’s often confused with degeneracy but it’s actually a form of moral regeneration …
… in addition to the usual solutions to insanity … stay locked up or learn to conform … there was a third one, to reject all movies, private and cultural, and head for Dynamic Quality itself, which is no movie at all … evolution doesn’t take place only within societies, it takes place within individuals too … Sometimes the insane & the contrarians & the ones who are closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has … They have taken the burdens of the culture onto themselves, and in their struggle … they’re solving problems for the culture as well.
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