So one of the things that Pearsig had very much skin-in-the-game experience with was what happened to him when he started to express ideas

that were antithetical to the culture that he was living in? So, you know, as a, as a young,

as somebody that had an IQ of 170,

had traveled to the east, studied Hindu philosophy,

come back to the West,

and then while interrogating

the question of quality had become catatonicly, let's say in a catatonic state had

basically appeared to all intents and purposes, appeared insane. The culture that he was in

had no choice but to categorize him as being insane and institutionalize him and effectively try and electroconvulse him to try and normalize him, right?

And Pearsig explains that the idea of classifying somebody as insane as a sort of binary operation of there is right, which is sane, and then there is wrong, which is insane, is a completely false, it's a completely false categorization.

Because in any culture, the person or, you know, group or individual who encourages or incites change in the culture is by definition thinking outside of the norms of the culture itself.

Right. Which means that anybody that wants to change the way the culture

is operating, technically then, is insane. Right. So Piercig explains that the people that instigate

change or the people that dynamically sense that there is a higher moral pursuit that the culture

should be interfacing with is of course going to

come into conflict with the current culture's value system. And the way that most cultures deal with

that is to simply disregard that person as being defective when in fact they could be holding

the keys to future prosperous, you know,

activity for the whole culture that could be good for everyone.

But this is a byproduct of an unavoidable feature of evolution itself, which is that in much the same way you have DNA, which is experimenting

with different configurations of how to code an organism, it protects itself with protein, which

reinforces the defence measures to stop the DNA from being destroyed. Right.

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