Question concerning GR

[Mat Jacobson]

The thesis is that The higher one rises in any system, the more one is controlled by it. 

There is a lot more truth to that than our cultural myths would have it- but yes- a dangerous road to acceptance of inequity as well as you posit. 

Sent from my iPad

> On Jun 16, 2014, at 4:29 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Those elite are less free because of their need to control.
> 
> The preterite are more free because they have no control.
> 
> Rats are more free in their maze than their masters watching from above.
> 
> Fear of death is GR's diagnosis of our disease.
> 
> David Morris
> 
>> On Saturday, June 14, 2014, Andrew Field <andrewfield2002 at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
>> Hey P-Lister's,
>> 
>> I'm going through my second reading of GR and it is clear that it is an absolute masterwork. There has been a passage that has always stuck out for me, and I'm undecided what rationale Pynchon gives to the following:
>> 
>> "I would see you free [talking to the rats), if I knew how. But it isn't free out here. All the animals, all the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize about freedom, but the least free of all."
>> 
>> The character who speaks it is Weberly Snail, but it is almost an inclusion of the author's voice at this part.
>> 
>> - This paragraph mirrors, ostensibly, the key theme of the book, technology and control (or freedom and domination, if you will), but the question is: why are the few elite the least free?
>> 
>> To me, it seems this is an evasion on Pynchon's part - an almost throwaway answer - that resists the complication of the obvious reply: they are more free than you because they are not part of the system of control the same way that we are. So who can blame the master for making you a slave, if he becomes more free because of it.
>> 
>> From the outset, to me, it seems the elite are more free because they can choose your bondage, and you will always be part of the scientific-technological control system. It doesn't make sense to think the elite are less free because they have to spend their time controlling you. It would amount to, in the master vs. slave dialectic, that the slave is more free. A counter-intuitive answer.
>> 
>> So, who is more free, and why did Pynchon think they were the least free?
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 
>> Andrew Field
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