What is quality?
Quality is total coherence—which is synonymous with total beauty. What has total coherence? Silence. Hence quality is synonymous with total silence—it is unobtrusive in the absolute sense. The watch mechanism that is high quality runs silent—and the human being who is high quality also runs silent (Americans are not high-quality people because they are notoriously loud and brash, whereas the Japanese have a high-quality unobtrusive nature in their blood).
Men have a higher quality than women because women must flaunt themselves and make an exhibition in order to be sexually attractive—anything that flaunts itself and draws attention to itself is tarty and meretricious, precisely because it is loud.
The whole principle is exemplified in the video above where various teapots are evaluated for their silence. The spout with the quietest pour has the highest quality.
The Eastern religions adhere to the principle Tat tam asi—“Thou art that”. What you think you are—everything you think you are—and everything you perceive exists without division, undivided. Where there is subject and object—as in language and logic—there is no wisdom, because there is a gap in coherence. Wisdom exists only in silence—only silence has total coherence, only silence has total quality.
This is what Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, didn’t get—despite all his enquiries into quality. When he was in India he refused to meditate—didn’t see the point. He had an engineer’s mind, a scientist’s mind—even though he knew those disciplines didn’t satisfy a need in him. Yet he couldn’t stand just to be silent—he had to break coherence and continue rational investigations, even though he had the answer on page 142/399.
Aristocratic societies are higher quality than democratic societies because the mob is loud—it makes constant demands, whereas an aristocrat is restrained. Hence the right is higher quality than the left because the left demonstrates and publishes endless loud demands—breaks into offices and buildings to occupy and protest, like a flagrant woman (total harlotry, of the political variety).
Multi-racial societies are low quality because such societies are characterised by clash and discord as coherence breaks down, and as inevitable disputes emerge between the constituent parts—everything becomes loud and unseemly. In the same way, LGBT “Pride” is an offence against quality, against God—because pride is loud and brash (just like a camp gay man).
The Jews are low-quality people because they are loud and fractious, with their pseudo-disputes and pseudo-theories—they raise the rabble against God; and yet their theories—Marxism, Freudianism—are always low quality and bring attention to what should remain unseen. For highly neurotic people, for Woody Allen, to moan loudly is important (like an old woman with her aches and pains and imaginary ills)—and it is low quality; we all suffer, only the Jews are so arrogant as not to suffer in silence.
Pirsig was from the left—that’s why he never got quality. He speaks about how he was pinned as a radical when he taught at a Montana university, and he exemplifies the faculty’s “ridiculous” attitude by the fact they refused to have Eleanor Roosevelt to speak (a First Lady is conservative by definition, for Pirsig); and yet Eleanor Roosevelt was far to the left—a revolutionary, loud and obtrusive for a wife (the first First Lady to be a campaigner, to be active in her own right—to be an activist). Pirsig didn’t get that—because he was also to the left, hence could not grasp quality.
God has the highest quality because God is totally unobtrusive—that is the grain of mustard that is so hard to see (finger to lips). I know this is true because when I started to write this on the train a group of young thugs came through and shouted, “Is this the quiet zone or the loud zone? Is this the quiet zone or the loud zone?”. Quality makes me laugh.