Lex: Value vs. Drive

pk Lexicon:

Value versus Drive

pk's lexicon is specialized. The dictionary, the encyclopedia, can give you only part of the meaning: you have to read pk, more than a little pk, to know the meaning; you could read lots of pk and still not know the meaning: if you don't read him "right."

Value:The mother holds her baby. Is she paid to do so? Is she paid by the hour? Will she be promoted? (What role is there "beyond" motherhood that she could be promoted to?)

The retiree catches a bass. He'd never fished before. But he experiences something his distant ancestors knew. But he didn't win a trophy, his name isn't in the paper, he's not running for President: is his experience worth anything?Drive:The mother leaves baby with the sitter. Dammit, she's going to win this mahjongg tournament!

The executive gives up his fishing vacation (he's never yet had a single fishing vacation). The contract his company is chasing is just too important."Value" is a term pk has long used in the present context; "drive" is not. The terms are formally paired-and-opposed by Jules Henry in his 1963 classic book Culture Against Man. pk arrived at the term "value," with great difficulty, in the middle 1960s, without having the benefit of yet discovering Henry's masterpiece. I came up with it in a (failing) effort to communicate what I meant by "God" to an aggressively deaf atheist: a very funny guy named Lev, a genius in some ways, but deaf-dumb-and-blind to religious emotion, religious metaphor. What was missing in his view that was present in mine? Value. His physics and mine were identical; but had opposite value.

Jules Henry's pairing, value versus drive, dovetails with my response to Ivan Illich as the great Christian saint. Illich, Illich's Jesus, Illich's Roman Catholic Church (on its "good" face; unlike its bad face) represented value; blind progress, blind growth, blind expansion ... US imperialism in the Third World ... represented "drive."

I'll proof this and add in some Henry quotes ASAP.