A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE METAPHYSICS OF QUALITY

 

Robert Pirsig’s revolutionary Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ) first emerged in his philosophical, best selling (5+ million copies) autobiographical novel Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, published in 1974. He later wrote Lila (1991), which refined and developed the MOQ.

Radical as Pirsig’s vision was, I’ve been struggling to understand and apply it ever since (much to the irritation of friends). The MOQ constructively addresses what Pirsig saw - and I think we all at least dimly perceive - as a fundamental misunderstanding in the Western-trained mind concerning our interpretation of reality. Pirsig traces the error back to the foundations of Western thinking in ancient Greek philosophy, at which time it arose as a necessary antidote to the mesmerizing influence of the rhetoricians (Protagoras, Gorgias, et al) who were holding Western thought hostage to ‘mere opinion’.

Pirsig calls the antidote that Plato and Aristotle introduced “Subject-Object Metaphysics” or SOM, whose unbroken influence can be traced from Greece to Roman, Islamic, and Renaissance thought, but which found its most influential expression in the Enlightenment.

Today we again find ourselves at a crossroads. We’ve an ancient invention of beguilingly huge benefit that has outlived its usefulness. Of initially unprecedented advantage to anyone who adopted it, the explosion of technological progress that SOM unleashed has today blossomed into a full-blown, global epidemic of uncontrolled invention that is threatening the very future of humanity.

So the question now arises: understanding that what inspired the Enlightenment may have reached the limit of its applicability, can we break free of its thrilling embrace enough to reassess our options, and launch onto a fresh trajectory? Voices are emerging with increasing frequency suggesting that a complete break with the institutions of the past may indeed be necessary, not only for our survival, but, more importantly, to lay the groundwork for what could be a fresh and abundant future.

But coming to grips with a course correction of this magnitude is no easy task. The mental fortifications surrounding this core of scientific dogma are formidable, and any attempt to breach them faces offhand dismissal, ridicule, and even ostracism – the natural weapons of social opprobrium that as social beings we do our utmost to avoid. Clearly the task requires intellects and personalities far more formidable than mine, but the challenge daily presents itself in one iteration after another, demanding attention like a loose tooth. The temerity of questioning our ingrained approach to interpreting reality becomes itself an invitation to do so.

So - the other day a short essay by the excellent James Corbett on the modern, wholesale falsification of belief again drew my attention to the loose tooth, and I thought I’d try using excerpts from it as a foil to demonstrate the difference between conventional Subject-Object Metaphysics (SOM) which appears to be Corbett’s P.O.V., and the Metaphysics Of Quality (MOQ) which is Pirsig’s approach to the problem of what is truth.

First, here’s a link to the full, James Corbett article, which is short and readable -

The CIA Won: Everything You Believe Is False by James Corbett of The Corbett Report, dated May 24, 2026.

In the following, excerpts from the above-linked essay are in italics.

He begins with a fairly well-known quote, as follows -

‘We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.’ – ex-CIA Director William Casey

…Barbara Honegger, the former Reagan campaign staffer… confirmed she heard Casey say those very words at a White House meeting in 1981.

‘…He said it at an early Feb. 1981 meeting… which I attended, and I immediately told my close friend and political godmother / Senior White House Correspondent Sarah McClendon, who then went public with it…’

So…[a]ccording to an eyewitness…, the CIA… want to deliberately deceive [the American] public to the point where they’re wrong about literally everything they believe…

...But… have you ever stopped to consider the fact that those who are the first to throw this quote at their ideological opponents may in fact be the biggest dupes of this disinformation campaign?...

Aren’t… the people who were decrying government censorship when it was being… directed at Trump supporters the very same people who are cheering on government censorship now that it’s being run by Trump and directed at pro-Palestinian campus protesters and leftist talk show hosts?

Corbett’s question addresses the conspicuous double standard being applied to censorship, thereby assuming the existence of an underlying universality that demands an equivalent universality of tolerance. This assumed equality implies a flatland of values which is itself created by our immersion in Subject-Object Metaphysics (SOM): our belief in an objective, measurable world “out there” which is the same for everyone. What gets in the way of dispassionate objectivity, it claims, is our willful and insubordinate subjectivity – feelings - which, being unmeasurable, have no objective reality and should be eliminated from consideration of what is ‘factual’, so as to ‘level the playing field’.

But the MOQ declares that reality is not an objective flatland at all. Its viewpoint is that of quantum physics, in which the observer is an integral part of whatever is being observed. If we view censorship through that lens, and consider only what actually occurs rather than what we think should be the case, I think we will see that in actual practice societies only tolerate freedom of speech when the dispute is minor, when those in opposition are an unthreatening minority, or when what they propose is judged too outlandish to deserve serious consideration. Censorship only becomes an issue when we find ourselves outside the limits of agreed community belief and our own freedom of speech is being curtailed. What we call freedom of speech is what we effortlessly experience when things are going right for us. That things are going wrong for our competitors signals, if we notice it at all, that all’s right with the world. Major disagreement with the prevailing norms we support - our common sense - is by definition outside the perimeter of allowable discourse and must for our health be suppressed. Censorship is intrinsic to society, welcomed as necessary by those whose values it protects, and objected to only by those who challenge the agreed values of the community. The dictum that ‘I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’ is an idealistic abstraction with very little support in the real world.         

…Indeed, we needn’t look too hard to find examples of Joe Q. Normie and Jane Q. Soccermom… falling for whatever pabulum is being dished out by the talking heads on the idiot box.

The universe is unfolding perfectly, elegantly, and without effort. Bertrand Russell referred to this as the ‘law of cosmic laziness’. In the human realm this manifests as harmonious social agreement, and its chief characteristic is an almost total absence of thought. Under ideal conditions – the default position - human life runs, like the universe, on automatic. Pablum, cliché, and repetition are - perhaps to the surprise of a modern world habituated to the idea that change is self-evidently good - the hallmarks of a contented society, whose inherent boredom is judiciously enlivened by humour, sports, tourism, literature, and entertainment, all evolving untraumatically under the wise and watchful eye of our recognized authorities. Talking heads on the idiot box are scripted to perpetuate this agreeable sameness, which comfortingly reinforces the mythology of the community – the filter through which events affecting them are processed into the single, shared, community experience we unthinkingly accept as factual and truthful. The intrusion of thought signals that this ideal, effortless flow is encountering turbulence. We are naturally encouraged in a healthy society not to think! Ridicule of those who overstep the boundaries set by the socially agreed facts is the instinctive nudge we give offenders to rejoin the mainstream.

This characteristic is now being exploited by those with their hands on the levers of power, to control our behaviour externally, by means of this natural tendency to proceed through life elegantly and with the least effort. Joe Q. Normie and Jane Q. Soccermom are innocent subjects of this project, responding naturally and unthinkingly to social cues that have shifted invisibly from natural to artificial, so as to produce an ersatz reality.

Now, to be sure, this isn’t a uniquely American phenomenon… All Casey was actually saying is that the agency’s disinfo campaign wouldn’t be complete until the American public was as misled as everyone else in the world.

This touches on the hubris of American exceptionalism, i.e. that other societies are self-evidently in error to the degree that they differ from the American way of life, which is the best thing going, although the CIA has incomprehensibly admitted it intends to entirely replace this near-perfect reality with fabrications, for reasons the pubic is not privy to.

And here the SOM error again emerges, in the belief that there is an objective Truth out there to which American culture is preeminently attuned. Again, Pirsig’s MOQ demands a shift in perspective: what the CIA is actually doing is undermining not Truth, but a uniquely American cultural agreement about what are facts – which amounts less ambitiously to a local truth manufactured by people who thereby identify as Americans. This external interference is causing divisions that will (intentionally) destroy American society not by delinking individuals from a supposed objective reality, but by dissociating them from their cultural agreement with one another about what are facts, which together form a constellation of beliefs particularly centred on the American experience. The former interpretation allows for the perpetuation of the cultural superiority which is the hallmark of every society today (“We’ve got a corner on Reality”) while the latter shift demands the humility of understanding that every society is identifiable by its unique interaction with and co-creation of a reality specific to that culture, and that evil consists precisely in the attempt to displace this organic, culturally unique reality with an artificially fabricated one for the purpose of external control.

And, take it from me, a Canadian in Japan who lived in Ireland and who has visited numerous countries across Europe and Asia: people around the world are as misled as the Americans are.

People around the world are perhaps not so much misled (is the CIA that omnipresent?) as they are willing participants in the specific myths that constitute the cultural fabric of their own distinct and separate communities. These varying myths are, like those of Americans, taken for the most part as objective truth by their adherents, who, like Americans, experience shock when they encounter myths that deviate from their own, and may then seek to ‘correct’ these ‘misguided’ beliefs of others whose interpretation of reality they don’t approve of, and which must therefore be false.

...but wait... You’re part of the public, aren’t you? And you’re not one of the dupes of the CIA’s disinfo campaign, are you?

And I’m… not one of the dupes of the CIA’s disinfo campaign, am I?

It’s not the case that everything we believe is false...is it?

Not if we sincerely believe it, no. Belief is everything. There is no absolute, objective reality out there that any authority can claim access to against which to judge it. Value itself is the only yardstick of reality, and value can’t be measured except in terms of better and worse. It’s understood that beliefs can change. We consider our own beliefs to be facts, but our facts are as mutable as are other people’s beliefs: they change with the integration of new experience into the fabric of our shared existence. Then follows the non sequitur that the new beliefs are the ‘real’ facts, while what we previously held to be facts are quietly demoted to the status of outdated beliefs. It is this evolving landscape of unceasing change that we refer to authoritatively as factual, because it is our experience, and it works.

...[W]e here in conspiracy reality land regard ourselves as the special few who have somehow or other managed to see through the CIA’s disinformation campaign.

This highlights the cultural confidence, edging into arrogance when circumstances permit, which is very much humanity’s default outlook, summed up as ‘I and mine are best’. We then surround ourselves with like-minded others, because there’s strength in numbers, and affirm our loyalty to the group by voluntary submission to all it demands of us.  From outside this cultural tent such loyalty appears strange and irrational, because we do not share it, but in fact it displays the healthy workings of a functioning community.

There have been any number of think pieces and op-eds and commentaries and even scientific articles opining on the nature of our ‘post-truth era’ ever since Trump took office the first time, in 2017. These hand-wringy jeremiads by globalist propagandists and establishment stooges warn us that Trump is leading his MAGA cult members off an epistemological cliff and that we are entering a world in which ‘objective facts matter less than personal feelings and ideological loyalty.’

This was the very objection Plato and Aristotle levelled at the rhetoricians! But the MOQ declares that personal feelings and ideological loyalty determine our selection of sense data and their interpretation as ‘objective facts’. The critical point is that personal feelings and ideological loyalty are shared. Isolated belief can be dismissed as insanity, but when two or three are gathered together you already have a cult, more and you have a religion, more still and you can argue from a position of factual respectability. To the extent that no man is an island, truth (you’re going to hate this!) is a popularity contest.

The truth, of course, is that we have been living in that ‘post-truth’ reality for a very long time.

The pre-existing world of truth was characterized by innocence, by a disarming tendency to say things as they sincerely appeared to us to be, without looking guiltily over our shoulder to see what politically correct edicts we had inadvertently violated. In the post-truth world all is cynically calculated to produce a desired effect – the very opposite of how we once ascertained the truth. The First Nations of America had a searingly descriptive phrase for this: ‘White man speaks with forked tongue.’

This was, after all, the very reality Orwell described in ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War,’ … In that piece, he… shares how the war was misrepresented in the newspapers back home.

But what was shocking to Orwell—and what should be shocking to us—is that the public not only knew that they were being lied to, they accepted it...

I think the MOQ would say that the public, to stay out of trouble, were 'just following orders' by realigning their hierarchy of beliefs to satisfy prevailing authority. We saw precisely this phenomenon in the reaction of the majority to Government mandates pertaining to the C0V1D response of 2020 (meekly submitting to jabs, masks, and social distancing), as well as to the 9/11 event of 2001, in which gravitational laws were exceptionally overlooked by experts in order to please the authorities by accommodating nineteen nasty Islamic hijackers with boxcutters rather than lose their jobs.

This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.

No! What was taken as objective truth was a community agreement about facts that served to sustain that community. Direct experience is manifestly the only doorway to reality. The group consensus arrived at by agreement about direct experience - e.g. ‘The world is flat’ - is then accepted by the community as objective reality. And so it remains – until it either encounters more durable experiences and explanations that refute or refine it, or it meets the conflicting ‘objectivity’ of a competing group, which is when the fighting starts.

Following the MOQ, what Corbett is saying is that shared community truth, which he calls objectivity, seems to be disappearing, which would leave the individual with nothing whatever on which to pin the values that hold life together by giving it meaning. The distinction is important: objectivity has no intrinsic value. It explicitly disallows value.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway.

- Only seen as lies because community histories are all selective interpretations, and these conflict inasmuch as their viewpoints and relative investment in outcomes differ from one community to another. In an objectivist world this variation would be interpreted as lies, or at least as error: ‘If I am right (as I objectively am) then you are wrong’.

I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased,

That which appears least biased is whatever can be agreed upon with the minimum of disturbance to this or that inevitably biased community participant. How can the world be viewed ‘objectively’? Does this mean without a viewpoint? From what viewpoint might it be said that the world is viewed correctly?

but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

It never could be, if truthful means objective! Written ‘objectively’ it would at best be an utterly tedious descriptive account of directly observable events and phenomena, down to a level of detail dictated not by common sense, which is the community agreement that dictates what’s relevant (for common sense becomes a casualty with the insistence on objectivity) but by the most reliable, finite resources available to painstakingly describe it: not just the number of participants in a battle (as recorded by inevitably conflicting and incomplete official records from each side), but their (Office of Statistics registered) names, (Board of Education verified) educational attainment, (church record confirmed) marital status, the (satellite confirmed) altitude, composition, and vegetation of the terrain, weather conditions (as recorded by the Meteorological Office), exact time of every incident (GMT), how participants were wounded or killed (weaponry, wound location, medical assistance if any)...in short, every damned measurable and verifiable thing, treated equally and without bias, that could conceivably have a bearing on the event (mustn’t leave anything out, it might be important – whatever that means), which would be everything except the feelings and motivations of the participants. And every detail of this would still be open to dispute! Why they were there and how they felt would not be objective considerations. Such immeasurables as motive would be automatically eliminated as objectively irrelevant.

This is clearly, totally absurd, and reveals by omission the way we actually establish that things and events are real, not objectively at all, but by means of community agreement about what is important, namely what holds value, giving it context, meaning and consequent existence, as against what can be measured, which has no intrinsic value whatsoever and which therefore paradoxically does not exist except as an abstraction.

It is this observation, of course—the observation that the public has become so used to the lies that they no longer believe in truth itself -

i.e. they have lost, not an objectivity that they never possessed, but faith in the cohesive, collective vision of their community, which means community has ceased as a socially binding force -

that informed Orwell’s later construction of the police state in Nineteen Eighty-Four and, by extension, our conception of the ultimate totalitarian regime. Big Brother’s mission was not complete until Winston truly believed two and two equaled five, or whatever else the party instructed him to believe.

The actual test involved the deliberate miscounting of upheld fingers, i.e. the denial of direct experience itself as interpreted by practical numeracy, which is a cornerstone of everything we take to be rational. 

It’s not hard to see the parallels with our own era. Indeed, how many times have we in the conspiracy reality community heard that ‘everything we’ve been told is a lie’? Does that include the observation itself—that ‘everything we’ve been told is a líe’—or is that observation excluded from the dictum? Indeed, a moment’s reflection reveals that the corrosive cynicism of the ‘everything is a lie’ refrain threatens to destroy even the refrain itself.

The refrain ‘everything is a lie’ derives from the perceived total discontinuity between what our common sense, upbringing and previous experience tell us is true, which supports our sense of self and belonging, and what we are being told by our traitorous authorities to believe. It registers the alienation of the totalitarian state, whose only meaning is derived from the acquisition of more power.

These reflections aren’t merely an exercise in philosophy. If we allow ourselves to become unmoored from truth,

- i.e. unmoored from the felt value of our culture and upbringing, not unmoored from any supposed objectively separate reality, to which mooring would be impossible. You can certainly become attached to the Imperial system of measurement on account of its familiarity, but can you fall in love with an inch? -

we end up a fractured, apathetic and feckless bunch, completely incapable of resisting the conspirators and their machinations.

Yes, this remains the outcome. The difference is that the subject-object metaphysics of materialism fails to acknowledge the inextricable involvement of our inner selves, as participants in a community of other participants, with the actual creation of what we mistakenly take to be an independent, objective world because it’s all we can ever know.

There is nothing less conducive to an informed, motivated and organized resistance than a public who has stopped believing in truth.

Yes, if truth means their participation in a cohesive community of belief. If we could all access an objective world independently of each other, which I think is what Corbett is assuming we do, then the organized resistance he mentions would be impossible from the get-go. There would be no organization, because the shared value that makes organization desirable would be absent! It is precisely the construction of a shared, community reality fashioned out of aligned, direct, individual experiences that allows for the organization upon which all community depends.

Indeed, what could be more completely contrary to research, study and investigation than the toxic shrug of cynical negation?

Cynicism is the absence of faith. Faith would not be required if objectivity could tell us without the need for debate or discussion exactly what is what. Faith is surrender to the flow of life in all its unquantifiable mystery. Genuine research is open-minded exploration, leaving the self open to impressions that may – or may not - fit the preconceptions with which we encounter and judge the world as it unfolds, and without which experience would mean nothing. We see what we believe.

Why waste your time studying the Iran war? Nuclear weapons don’t exist!

Such an opinion might very legitimately be that of a community with no connection to the outside world – say, Congolese pygmies, or New Guinea Highlanders. Such communities comprised the majority of humanity until 200 years ago. Nothing exists for which we don’t have a value. That which has no value to us does not exist. In that sense ignorance is bliss, (and for that reason people routinely block out whatever makes them feel uncomfortable, or makes them think.)

Why waste your time studying bioweapons? Viruses don’t exist!

It remains extraordinarily challenging to demonstrate that they do. They are as close to non-existence as it is possible to get - but countless careers depend on them existing!

Why waste your time studying the secret space program? Space doesn’t exist (and the earth is flat, you ignorant globetard!).

Inertia is the default condition of bodies, whether physical or social, until acted upon by an external force. Beliefs persist until external force is applied to change them. Flat Earthism and Creationism are both particularly inimical to scientism because they disagree, on less evidence, with mainstream beliefs the inertia of which is well-fortified by supporting agreements concerning fundamental physical and biological phenomena of even greater experiential inertia, the dismissal of which would destabilise great masses of agreement about the nature of the world. Archeology and paleontology today face similar challenges: they have vast, historical inertia ossified around facts increasingly challenged by evidence of conflicting but equal weight. Resistance consists not of better facts, but of the inertia of  the institutions and reputations built around them.

Why waste your time studying 9/11 or the Boston Marathon Bombing or any other War of Terror incident? It was all holograms and crisis actors!

Well, indeed, what was 9/11? That ‘the truth will come out’ assumes a considerable community recalibration of what is already accepted in the mainstream as the truth. Believers in American exceptionalism will continue to dismiss everything but the Establishment 9/11 narrative. Zionists will follow an inside job interpretation up to the point that Mossad is implicated, at which point they will switch off. Observers with neither loyalty will still face insoluble choices in determining what happened based on, inevitably, insufficient reliable information to form the ever-elusive complete picture. Unlike the vague haze surrounding the UFO question, the Government 9/11 narrative is already baked into the fabric of mainstream American culture as fact; broadcast by respectable news media, published in history books, and taught in schools. That’s a lot of cultural inertia to dislodge!

You see, it’s not just that everything you believe is false. It’s that, when you fall for Casey’s disinformation campaign, you believe everything is false! There is no news event or earthshaking development that can’t be dismissed with the rallying cries of the modern-day conspiracy theorist: ‘It doesn’t exist!’ or ‘It never happened!’ or ‘It’s all fake!’…

This, again, speaks of the disintegration not of objectivity, but of the shared meaning that holds communities together. Lone individuals who disavow community beliefs are by community definition insane, a definition amply demonstrated in the mental asylums of the Soviet Union, as it remains a given in psychiatry today. This is also again where faith comes in. Lived with honesty experience becomes its own justification – ask any child. The meaning of life is in the living of it. Nothing lies outside this. What is the meaning of a giraffe? It is what it is. To be itself is its entirely adequate justification. Meister Eckhart called the apprehension of this immediacy ‘isness’. The alienation created by thinking and the subject-object split that arises from this creates the existential problem that “the son of man has no place to lay his head” (Luke 9:58) - and note that it is his head, not his body, that is specifically named as the organ without a home.

And if we truly believe that ‘everything we’ve been told is a lie’—if, in other words, we have no bedrock of truth on which to stand other than our own feelings and intuitions—then what’s the point of building community?

Corbett appears here to put community downstream from ‘the bedrock of truth’ which presumably consists of objective facts supplied by our trusted authorities, whose lies are now killing the entire process. The MOQ states that our own feelings and intuitions are themselves the very bedrock of truth, from which the community agreement we call common sense emerges.  The insistence on objectivity as a first principle – the religion of scientism – puts the cart before the horse: a flatland devoid of intrinsic meaning (true enough) produces our rich experience as a mere, magically generated artifact. But the MOQ states that ‘I’ and ‘the world’ arise simultaneously as a single, on-going experience. Thinking then separates them, and no meaning of any kind can thereafter be found in the world separate from our experience of it (The SOM error). The task is to resist coercion, assert sovereignty,  and create community out of shared experience.

What’s the purpose of taking action to counteract the evildoers?

Counteracting the evildoers means, precisely, guiding humanity back into the path of sincerity; to say what we honestly believe regardless of our circumstances, not whatever we cynically think will get us what we want (‘White man speaks with forked tongue!’)

What’s the use of finding points of agreement with like-minded people and building coalitions to improve our lot in life?

That is arguably both the entire point of existence, and the means of achieving it!

Given the foregoing… [w]hat could we establish as a standard for measuring, not the CIA’s success, but the CIA’s failure?

Perhaps: ‘We’ll know the CIA’s disinformation campaign has failed when a critical mass of the public is actively engaged in working with their friends and neighbours to vet information, establish what is true, and work together to improve the conditions of their existence.’

To the extent that this definition mirrors how communities actually remain cohesive, it’s valid. What may need adding is that ‘communities’ need to remain plural - a multitude of internally evolving agreements we might call myths - rather than being shoehorned into a single, externally-applied, ideological fiction. Variety of belief between communities, even as it requires borders to respect these differences, is as necessary a part of truth as is unanimity within communities. Variety, after all, is the spice of life. 

 

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Some axioms derived from the Metaphysics of Quality –

·         The universe, of which we are an integral part, is moral.

·         Duality is an illusion that arises spontaneously from the thinking process.

·         Objectivity is a useful fiction grounded in dualistic thinking.

·         Objectivity is descriptive, not prescriptive.

·         You can’t extract an imperative (“Do this”) from an indicative (“This is”).

·         Strict adherence to Subject-Object Metaphysics eliminates volition.

·         All that exists has value (of which nihilism is the denial).

·         We see what we believe.

·         What we think we see is the same as what we think we are.

·         Facts are community agreements.

·         As no man is an island so truth is a popularity contest.

·         SOM erroneously claims objectivity in judging sanity from the limited perspective of the community in which it is situated.