The Search For Quality is Pointless

A first-person writing influenced by Robert M. Pirsig's endless search for the true definition of quality.

Quality: that elusive word that gets thrown back and forth every second in schools, businesses, and just everyday life. Quality can be many things, depending on who you are. Some say that quality is based on how good something looks or how well it works. Others say that quality is based on whether or not there was a lot of obvious effort in whatever the person or organization created or accomplished.

I personally believe that quality is an ambiguous creature; it is not definite and cannot just be defined by one person’s definition. There are so many different mindsets and areas where quality can be judged, it would be physically and mentally impossible to just say, “This, right here, is an example of perfect quality in every area of expertise and personal thinking.” I think that Pirsig and his students had a hard time wrapping their heads around this concept because everyone wants everything to be so unequivocal. We, in our society, cannot accept that something is just not certain.

Thought and statement cannot just be defined by quality. Some people are critical thinkers, so one would say their thoughts are true quality because they can sit and think deeply and fast on the subject. Statement is always quality. It just is such a grey area, we feel that we have to judge someone else’s statement constantly because we always think that we are right. Someone’s statement is their opinion, regardless if it has evidence to support it or not. We feel as if we have to justify what we say, think, or believe: like our thoughts and words have to have a certain quality.

That is one of the major errors in modern human nature. The philosophes in Europe during the Great Awakening just spoke their minds. They thought about what they were going to say, but they did not necessarily think of how qualitative it was. They wrote and said whatever they thought was right when it came to life and philosophy; that includes thought and statement. Modern humans need to be like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. We need to realize that someone else cannot define the true and full quality of our opinions and thoughts on any topic. Judging someone’s opinion on something you yourself have not experienced is not defining the quality of that statement.

While that person’s opinion or thought seems to lean to one side or the other, whether it is gooey or prickly, it will always have a tiny portion of the other side of the spectrum, which means that it is stitched together by quality, therefore having it. The irony behind this, though, is that quality can also be put into a gooey and prickly scale, so even quality is ambiguous in that sense.

When it comes to judging the quality of someone else’s thoughts or statements, the quote from Twin Peaks comes to mind: “Maybe I am overreacting, but they’re my reactions, and the hurt I feel is my hurt, and how I react is none of your damn business.”-Norma Jennings. She says this after her mother highly criticizes the quality of her restaurant, then tells her she is overreacting. Her mother never slaved over keeping up the Double R Diner, yet she feels as if she can judge the quality of it. She also is not constantly emotionally abused, like Norma is by her, then she tries to judge the quality of her reactions.

Thoughts and statements cannot be judged based on your viewpoint of quality, but by the quality we see in everything: its flaws. If something is flawed, it will be even more appreciated when someone can look past that and see the quality in it, see the care and effort it took to get there. As Fa Zhou said in Mulan, “The flower that blooms in adversity is the most beautiful of them all.”