The intermittent failure setback is next. In this the thing that is wrong becomes right all of a sudden just as you start to fix it. Electrical short circuits are often in this class. The short occurs only when the machineâs bouncing around. As soon as you stop everythingâs okay. Itâs almost impossible to fix it then. All you can do is try to get it to go wrong again and if it wonât, forget it. Intermittents become gumption traps when they fool you into thinking youâve really got the machine fixed. Itâs always a good idea on any job to wait a few hundred miles before coming to that conclusion. Theyâre discouraging when they crop up again and again, but when they do youâre no worse off than someone who goes to a commercial mechanic. In fact youâre better off. Theyâre much more of a gumption trap for the owner who has to drive his machine to the shop again and again and never get satisfaction. On your own machine you can study them over a long period of time, something a commercial mechanic canât do, and you can just carry around the tools you think youâll need until the intermittent happens again, and then, when it happens, stop and work on it. When intermittents recur, try to correlate them with other things the cycle is doing. Do the misfires, for example, occur only on bumps, only on turns, only on acceleration? Only on hot days? These correlations are clues for cause-and-effect hypotheses. In some intermittents you have to resign yourself to a long fishing expedition, but no matter how tedious that gets itâs never as tedious as taking the machine to a commercial mechanic five times. Iâm tempted to go into long detail about âIntermittents I Have Knownâ with a blow-by-blow description of how these were solved. But this gets like those fishing stories, of interest mainly to the fisherman, who doesnât quite catch on to why everybody yawns. He enjoyed it. Next to misassemblies and intermittents I think the most common external gumption trap is the parts setback. Here a person who does his own work can get depressed in a number of ways. Parts are something you never plan on buying when you originally get the machine. Dealers like to keep their inventories small. Wholesalers are slow and always understaffed in the spring when everybody buys motorcycle parts. The pricing on parts is the second part of this gumption trap. Itâs a well-known industrial policy to price the original equipment competitively, because the customer can always go somewhere else, but on parts to overprice and clean up. The price of the part is not only jacked up way beyond its new price; you get a special price because youâre not a commercial mechanic. This is a sly arrangement that allows the commercial mechanic to get rich by putting in parts that arenât needed. One more hurdle yet. The part may not fit. Parts lists always contain mistakes. Make and model changes are confusing. Out-of-tolerance parts runs sometimes get through quality control because thereâs no operating checkout at the factory. Some of the parts you buy are made by specialty houses who donât have access to the engineering data needed to make them right. Sometimes they get confused about make and model changes. Sometimes the parts man youâre dealing with jots down the wrong number. Sometimes you donât give him the right identification. But itâs always a major gumption trap to get all the way home and discover that a new part wonât work. The parts traps may be overcome by a combination of a number of techniques. First, if thereâs more than one supplier in town by all means choose the one with the most cooperative parts man. Get to know him on a first-name basis. Often he will have been a mechanic once himself and can provide a lot of information you need. Keep an eye out for price cutters and give them a try. Some of them have good deals. Auto stores and mail-order houses frequently stock the commoner cycle parts at prices way below those of the cycle dealers. You can buy roller chain from chain manufacturers, for example, at way below the inflated cycle-shop prices. Always take the old part with you to prevent getting a wrong part. Take along some machinistâs calipers for comparing dimensions. Finally, if youâre as exasperated as I am by the parts problem and have some money to invest, you can take up the really fascinating hobby of machining your own parts. I have a little 6-by-18-inch lathe with a milling attachment and a full complement of welding equipment: arc, heli-arc, gas and mini-gas for this kind of work. With the welding equipment you can build up worn surfaces with better than original metal and then machine it back to tolerance with carbide tools. You canât really believe how versatile that lathe-plus-milling-plus-welding arrangement is until youâve used it. If you canât do the job directly you can always make something that will do it. The work of machining a part is very slow, and some parts, such as ball bearings, youâre never going to machine, but youâd be amazed at how you can modify parts designs so that you can make them with your equipment, and the work isnât nearly as slow or frustrating as a wait for some smirking parts man to send away to the factory. And the work is gumption building, not gumption destroying. To run a cycle with parts in it youâve made yourself gives you a special feeling you canât possibly get from strictly store-bought parts.
Well, those were the commonest setbacks I can think of: out-of-sequence reassembly, intermittent failure and parts problems. But although setbacks are the commonest gumption traps theyâre only the external cause of gumption loss. Time now to consider some of the internal gumption traps that operate at the same time. As the course description of gumptionology indicated, this internal part of the field can be broken down into three main types of internal gumption traps: those that block affective understanding, called âvalue trapsâ; those that block cognitive understanding, called âtruth trapsâ; and those that block psychomotor behavior, called âmuscle traps.â The value traps are by far the largest and the most dangerous group. Of the value traps, the most widespread and pernicious is value rigidity. This is an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to previous values. In motorcycle maintenance, you must rediscover what you do as you go. Rigid values make this impossible. The typical situation is that the motorcycle doesnât work. The facts are there but you donât see them. Youâre looking right at them, but they donât yet have enough value. This is what Phaedrus was talking about. Quality, value, creates the subjects and objects of the world. The facts do not exist until value has created them. If your values are rigid you canât really learn new facts. This often shows up in premature diagnosis, when youâre sure you know what the trouble is, and then when it isnât, youâre stuck. Then youâve got to find some new clues, but before you can find them youâve got to clear your head of old opinions. If youâre plagued with value rigidity you can fail to see the real answer even when itâs staring you right in the face because you canât see the new answerâs importance. The birth of a new fact is always a wonderful thing to experience. Itâs dualistically called a âdiscoveryâ because of the presumption that it has an existence independent of anyoneâs awareness of it. When it comes along, it always has, at first, a low value. Then, depending on the value-looseness of the observer and the potential quality of the fact, its value increases, either slowly or rapidly, or the value wanes and the fact disappears. The overwhelming majority of facts, the sights and sounds that are around us every second and the relationships among them and everything in our memory⊠these have no Quality, in fact have a negative quality. If they were all present at once our consciousness would be so jammed with meaningless data we couldnât think or act. So we preselect on the basis of Quality, or, to put it Phaedrusâ way, the track of Quality preselects what data weâre going to be conscious of, and it makes this selection in such a way as to best harmonize what we are with what we are becoming. What you have to do, if you get caught in this gumption trap of value rigidity, is slow down⊠youâre going to have to slow down anyway whether you want to or not⊠but slow down deliberately and go over ground that youâve been over before to see if the things you thought were important were really important and to - well - just stare at the machine. Thereâs nothing wrong with that. Just live with it for a while. Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long, as sure as you live, youâll get a little nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if youâre interested in it. Thatâs the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it. At first try to understand this new fact not so much in terms of your big problem as for its own sake. That problem may not be as big as you think it is. And that fact may not be as small as you think it is. It may not be the fact you want but at least you should be very sure of that before you send the fact away. Often before you send it away you will discover it has friends who are right next to it and are watching to see what your response is. Among the friends may be the exact fact you are looking for. After a while you may find that the nibbles you get are more interesting than your original purpose of fixing the machine. When that happens youâve reached a kind of point of arrival. Then youâre no longer strictly a motorcycle mechanic, youâre also a motorcycle scientist, and youâve completely conquered the gumption trap of value rigidity.
I keep wanting to go back to that analogy of fishing for facts. I can just see somebody asking with great frustration, âYes, but which facts do you fish for? Thereâs got to be more to it than that.â But the answer is that if you know which facts youâre fishing for youâre no longer fishing. Youâve caught them. Iâm trying to think of a specific example. All kinds of examples from cycle maintenance could be given, but the most striking example of value rigidity I can think of is the old South Indian Monkey Trap, which depends on value rigidity for its effectiveness. The trap consists of a hollowed-out coconut chained to a stake. The coconut has some rice inside which can be grabbed through a small hole. The hole is big enough so that the monkeyâs hand can go in, but too small for his fist with rice in it to come out. The monkey reaches in and is suddenly trappedâŠby nothing more than his own value rigidity. He canât revalue the rice. He cannot see that freedom without rice is more valuable than capture with it. The villagers are coming to get him and take him away. Theyâre coming closer - closer! - now! What general advice⊠not specific advice⊠but what general advice would you give the poor monkey in circumstances like this? Well, I think you might say exactly what Iâve been saying about value rigidity, with perhaps a little extra urgency. There is a fact this monkey should know: if he opens his hand heâs free. But how is he going to discover this fact? By removing the value rigidity that rates rice above freedom. How is he going to do that? Well, he should somehow try to slow down deliberately and go over ground that he has been over before and see if things he thought were important really were important and, well, stop yanking and just stare at the coconut for a while. Before long he should get a nibble from a little fact wondering if he is interested in it. He should try to understand this fact not so much in terms of his big problem as for its own sake. That problem may not be as big as he thinks it is. That fact may not be as small as he thinks it is either. Thatâs about all the general information you can give him.
The next one is important. Itâs the internal gumption trap of ego. Ego isnât entirely separate from value rigidity but one of the many causes of it. If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened. Your ego isolates you from the Quality reality. When the facts show that youâve just goofed, youâre not as likely to admit it. When false information makes you look good, youâre likely to believe it. On any mechanical repair job ego comes in for rough treatment. Youâre always being fooled, youâre always making mistakes, and a mechanic who has a big ego to defend is at a terrific disadvantage. If you know enough mechanics to think of them as a group, and your observations coincide with mine, I think youâll agree that mechanics tend to be rather modest and quiet. There are exceptions, but generally if theyâre not quiet and modest at first, the work seems to make them that way. And skeptical. Attentive, but skeptical, But not egoistic. Thereâs no way to bullshit your way into looking good on a mechanical repair job, except with someone who doesnât know what youâre doing. I was going to say that the machine doesnât respond to your personality, but it does respond to your personality. Itâs just that the personality that it responds to is your real personality, the one that genuinely feels and reasons and acts, rather than any false, blown-up personality images your ego may conjure up. These false images are deflated so rapidly and completely youâre bound to be very discouraged very soon if youâve derived your gumption from ego rather than Quality. If modesty doesnât come easily or naturally to you, one way out of this trap is to fake the attitude of modesty anyway. If you just deliberately assume youâre not much good, then your gumption gets a boost when the facts prove this assumption is correct. This way you can keep going until the time comes when the facts prove this assumption is incorrect. Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. Youâre so sure youâll do everything wrong youâre afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than âlaziness,â is the real reason you find it hard to get started. This gumption trap of anxiety, which results from overmotivation, can lead to all kinds of errors of excessive fussiness. You fix things that donât need fixing, and chase after imaginary ailments. You jump to wild conclusions and build all kinds of errors into the machine because of your own nervousness. These errors, when made, tend to confirm your original underestimation of yourself. This leads to more errors, which lead to more underestimation, in a self-stoking cycle. The best way to break this cycle, I think, is to work out your anxieties on paper. Read every book and magazine you can on the subject. Your anxiety makes this easy and the more you read the more you calm down. You should remember that itâs peace of mind youâre after and not just a fixed machine. When beginning a repair job you can list everything youâre going to do on little slips of paper which you then organize into proper sequence. You discover that you organize and then reorganize the sequence again and again as more and more ideas come to you. The time spent this way usually more than pays for itself in time saved on the machine and prevents you from doing fidgety things that create problems later on. You can reduce your anxiety somewhat by facing the fact that there isnât a mechanic alive who doesnât louse up a job once in a while. The main difference between you and the commercial mechanics is that when they do it you donât hear about it⊠just pay for it, in additional costs prorated through all your bills. When you make the mistakes yourself, you at ]east get the benefit of some education. Boredom is the next gumption trap that comes to mind. This is the opposite of anxiety and commonly goes with ego problems. Boredom means youâre off the Quality track, youâre not seeing things freshly, youâve lost your âbeginnerâs mindâ and your motorcycle is in great danger. Boredom means your gumption supply is low and must be replenished before anything else is done. When youâre bored, stop! Go to a show. Turn on the TV. Call it a day. Do anything but work on that machine. If you donât stop, the next thing that happens is the Big Mistake, and then all the boredom plus the Big Mistake combine together in one Sunday punch to knock all the gumption out of you and you are really stopped. My favorite cure for boredom is sleep. Itâs very easy to get to sleep when bored and very hard to get bored after a long rest. My next favorite is coffee. I usually keep a pot plugged in while working on the machine. If these donât work it may mean deeper Quality problems are bothering you and distracting you from whatâs before you. The boredom is a signal that you should turn your attention to these problemsâŠthatâs what youâre doing anywayâŠand control them before continuing on the motorcycle. For me the most boring task is cleaning the machine. It seems like such a waste of time. It just gets dirty again the first time you ride it. John always kept his BMW spic and span. It really did look nice, while mineâs always a little ratty, it seems. Thatâs the classical mind at work, runs fine inside but looks dingy on the surface. One solution to boredom on certain kinds of jobs such as greasing and oil changing and tuning is to turn them into a kind of ritual. Thereâs an esthetic to doing things that are unfamiliar and another esthetic to doing things that are familiar. I have heard that there are two kinds of welders: production welders, who donât like tricky setups and enjoy doing the same thing over and over again; and maintenance welders, who hate it when they have to do the same job twice. The advice was that if you hire a welder make sure which kind he is, because theyâre not interchangeable. Iâm in that latter class, and thatâs probably why I enjoy troubleshooting more than most and dislike cleaning more than most. But I can do both when I have to and so can anyone else. When cleaning I do it the way people go to churchâŠnot so much to discover anything new, although Iâm alert for new things, but mainly to reacquaint myself with the familiar. Itâs nice sometimes to go over familiar paths. Zen has something to say about boredom. Its main practice of âjust sittingâ has got to be the worldâs most boring activityâŠunless itâs that Hindu practice of being buried alive. You donât do anything much; not move, not think, not care. What could be more boring? Yet in the center of all this boredom is the very thing Zen Buddhism seeks to teach. What is it? What is it at the very center of boredom that youâre not seeing. Impatience is close to boredom but always results from one cause: an underestimation of the amount of time the job will take. You never really know what will come up and very few jobs get done as quickly as planned. Impatience is the first reaction against a setback and can soon turn to anger if youâre not careful. Impatience is best handled by allowing an indefinite time for the job, particularly new jobs that require unfamiliar techniques; by doubling the allotted time when circumstances force time planning; and by scaling down the scope of what you want to do. Overall goals must be scaled down in importance and immediate goals must be scaled up. This requires value flexibility, and the value shift is usually accompanied by some loss of gumption, but itâs a sacrifice that must be made. Itâs nothing like the loss of gumption that will occur if a Big Mistake caused by impatience occurs. My favorite scaling-down exercise is cleaning up nuts and bolts and studs and tapped holes.
Iâve got a phobia about crossed or jimmied or rust-jammed or dirt-jammed threads that cause nuts to turn slow or hard; and when I find one, I take its dimensions with a thread gauge and calipers, get out the taps and dies, recut the threads on it, then examine it and oil it and I have a whole new perspective on patience. Another one is cleaning up tools that have been used and not put away and are cluttering up the place. This is a good one because one of the first warning signs of impatience is frustration at not being able to lay your hand on the tool you need right away. If you just stop and put tools away neatly you will both find the tool and also scale down your impatience without wasting time or endangering the work.
Well, that about does it for value traps. Thereâs a whole lot more of them, of course. Iâve really only just touched on the subject to show whatâs there. Almost any mechanic could fill you in for hours on value traps heâs discovered that I donât know anything about. Youâre bound to discover plenty of them for yourself on almost every job. Perhaps the best single thing to learn is to recognize a value trap when youâre in it and work on that before you continue on the machine.
Truth traps are concerned with data that are apprehended and are within the boxcars of the train. For the most part these data are properly handled by conventional dualistic logic and the scientific method talked about earlier, back just after Miles City. But thereâs one trap that isnâtâŠthe truth trap of yes-no logic. Yes and no â this or that â one or zero. On the basis of this elementary two-term discrimination, all human knowledge is built up. The demonstration of this is the computer memory which stores all its knowledge in the form of binary information. It contains ones and zeros, thatâs all. Because weâre unaccustomed to it, we donât usually see that thereâs a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We donât even have a term for it, so Iâll have to use the Japanese mu. Mu means âno thing.â Like âQualityâ it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, âNo class; not one, not zero, not yes, not no.â It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. âUnask the questionâ is what it says. Mu becomes appropriate when the context of the question becomes too small for the truth of the answer. When the Zen monk Joshu was asked whether a dog had a Buddha nature he said âMu,â meaning that if he answered either way he was answering incorrectly. The Buddha nature cannot be captured by yes or no questions. That mu exists in the natural world investigated by science is evident. Itâs just that, as usual, weâre trained not to see it by our heritage. For example, itâs stated over and over again that computer circuits exhibit only two states, a voltage for âoneâ and a voltage for âzero.â Thatâs silly. Any computer-electronics technician knows otherwise. Try to find a voltage representing one or zero when the power is off! The circuits are in a mu state. They arenât at one, they arenât at zero, theyâre in an indeterminate state that has no meaning in terms of ones or zeros. Readings of the voltmeter will show, in many cases, âfloating groundâ characteristics, in which the technician isnât reading characteristics of the computer circuits at all but characteristics of the voltmeter itself. Whatâs happened is that the power-off condition is part of a context larger than the context in which the one zero states are considered universal. The question of one or zero has been âunasked.â And there are plenty of other computer conditions besides a power-off condition in which mu answers are found because of larger contexts than the one-zero universality. The dualistic mind tends to think of mu occurrences in nature as a kind of contextual cheating, or irrelevance, but mu is found throughout all scientific investigation, and nature doesnât cheat, and natureâs answers are never irrelevant. Itâs a great mistake, a kind of dishonesty, to sweep natureâs mu answers under the carpet. Recognition and valuatian of these answers would do a lot to bring logical theory closer to experimental practice. Every laboratory scientist knows that very often his experimental results provide mu answers to the yes-no questions the experiments were designed for. In these cases he considers the experiment poorly designed, chides himself for stupidity and at best considers the âwastedâ experiment which has provided the mu answer to be a kind of wheel-spinning which might help prevent mistakes in the design of future yes-no experiments. This low evaluation of the experiment which provided the mu answer isnât justified. The mu answer is an important one. Itâs told the scientist that the context of his question is too small for natureâs answer and that he must enlarge the context of the question. That is a very important answer! His understanding of nature is tremendously improved by it, which was the purpose of the experiment in the first place. A very strong case can be made for the statement that science grows by its mu answers more than by its yes or no answer. Yes or no confirms or denies a hypothesis. Mu says the answer is beyond the hypothesis. Mu is the âphenomenonâ that inspires scientific enquiry in the first place! Thereâs nothing mysterious or esoteric about it. Itâs just that our culture has warped us to make a low value judgment of it. In motorcycle maintenance the mu answer given by the machine to many of the diagnostic questions put to it is a major cause of gumption loss. It shouldnât be! When your answer to a test is indeterminate it means one of two things: that your test procedures arenât doing what you think they are or that your understanding of the context of the question needs to be enlarged. Check your tests and restudy the question. Donât throw away those mu answers! Theyâre every bit as vital as the yes or no answers. Theyâre more vital. Theyâre the ones you grow on!
The mu expansion is the only thing I want to say about truth traps at this time. Time to switch to the psychomotor traps. This is the domain of understanding which is most directly related to what happens to the machine. Here by far the most frustrating gumption trap is inadequate tools. Nothingâs quite so demoralizing as a tool hang-up. Buy good tools as you can afford them and youâll never regret it. If you want to save money donât overlook the newspaper want ads. Good tools, as a rule, donât wear out, and good secondhand tools are much better than inferior new ones. Study the tool catalogs. You can learn a lot from them. Apart from bad tools, bad surroundings are a major gumption trap. Pay attention to adequate lighting. Itâs amazing the number of mistakes a little light can prevent. Some physical discomfort is unpreventable, but a lot of it, such as that which occurs in surroundings that are too hot or too cold, can throw your evaluations way off if you arenât careful. If youâre too cold, for example, youâll hurry and probably make mistakes. If youâre too hot your anger threshold gets much lower. Avoid out-of-position work when possible. A small stool on either side of the cycle will increase your patience greatly and youâll be much less likely to damage the assemblies youâre working on. Thereâs one psychomotor gumption trap, muscular insensitivity, which accounts for some real damage. It results in part from lack of kinesthesia, a failure to realize that although the externals of a cycle are rugged, inside the engine are delicate precision parts which can be easily damaged by muscular insensitivity. Thereâs whatâs called âmechanicâs feel,â which is very obvious to those who know what it is, but hard to describe to those who donât; and when you see someone working on a machine who doesnât have it, you tend to suffer with the machine. The mechanicâs feel comes from a deep inner kinesthetic feeling for the elasticity of materials. Some materials, like ceramics, have very little, so that when you thread a porcelain fitting youâre very careful not to apply great pressures. Other materials, like steel, have tremendous elasticity, more than rubber, but in a range in which, unless youâre working with large mechanical forces, the elasticity isnât apparent. With nuts and bolts youâre in the range of large mechanical forces and you should understand that within these ranges metals are elastic. When you take up a nut thereâs a point called âfinger-tightâ where thereâs contact but no takeup of elasticity. Then thereâs âsnug,â in which the easy surface elasticity is taken up. Then thereâs a range called âtight,â in which all the elasticity is taken up. The force required to reach these three points is different for each size of nut and bolt, and different for lubricated bolts and for locknuts. The forces are different for steel and cast iron and brass and aluminum and plastics and ceramics. But a person with mechanicâs feel knows when somethingâs tight and stops. A person without it goes right on past and strips the threads or breaks the assembly. A âmechanicâs feelâ implies not only an understanding for the elasticity of metal but for its softness. The insides of a motorcycle contain surfaces that are precise in some cases to as little as one ten-thousandth of an inch. If you drop them or get dirt on them or scratch them or bang them with a hammer theyâll lose that precision. Itâs important to understand that the metal behind the surfaces can normally take great shock and stress but that the surfaces themselves cannot. When handling precision parts that are stuck or difficult to manipulate, a person with mechanicâs feel will avoid damaging the surfaces and work with his tools on the nonprecision surfaces of the same part whenever possible.
If he must work on the surfaces themselves, heâll always use softer surfaces to work them with. Brass hammers, plastic hammers, wood hammers, rubber hammers and lead hammers are all available for this work. Use them. Vise jaws can be fitted with plastic and copper and lead faces. Use these too. Handle precision parts gently. Youâll never be sorry. If you have a tendency to bang things around, take more time and try to develop a little more respect for the accomplishment that a precision part represents.
Maybe itâs just the usual late afternoon letdown, but after all Iâve said about all these things today I just have a feeling that Iâve somehow talked around the point. Some could ask, âWell, if I get around all those gumption traps, then will I have the thing licked?â The answer, of course, is no, you still havenât got anything licked. Youâve got to live right too. Itâs the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? Itâs easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. Thatâs the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isnât separate from the rest of your existence. If youâre a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you arenât working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together. But if youâre a sloppy thinker six days a week and you really try to be sharp on the seventh, then maybe the next six days arenât going to be quite as sloppy as the preceding six. What Iâm trying to come up with on these gumption traps I guess, is shortcuts to living right. The real cycle youâre working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be âout thereâ and the person that appears to be âin hereâ are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.
I watch the cars go by for a while on the highway. Something lonely about them. Not lonelyâŠworse. Nothing. Like the attendantâs expression when he filled the tank. Nothing. A nothing curb, by some nothing gravel, at a nothing intersection, going nowhere. Something about the car drivers too. They look just like the gasoline attendant, staring straight ahead in some private trance of their own. I havenât seen that since â since Sylvia noticed it the first day. They all look like theyâre in a funeral procession. Once in a while one gives a quick glance and then looks away expressionlessly, as if minding his own business, as if embarrassed that we might have noticed he was looking at us. I see it now because weâve been away from it for a long time. The driving is different too. The cars seem to be moving at a steady maximum speed for in-town driving, as though they want to get somewhere, as though whatâs here right now is just something to get through. The drivers seem to be thinking about where they want to be rather than where they are. I know what it is! Weâve arrived at the West Coast! Weâre all strangers again! Folks, I just forgot the biggest gumption trap of all. The funeral procession! The one everybodyâs in, this hyped-up, fuck-you, supermodern, ego style of life that thinks it owns this country. Weâve been out of it for so long Iâd forgotten all about it.
We see much more of this loneliness now. Itâs paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas youâd think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didnât see it so much. The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. Itâs psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here itâs reversed. Itâs the primary America weâre in. It hit the night before last in Prineville Junction and itâs been with us ever since. Thereâs this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of whatâs immediately around them. The media have convinced them that whatâs right around them is unimportant. And thatâs why theyâre lonely. You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, youâre just a kind of an object. You donât count. Youâre not what theyâre looking for. Youâre not on TV. But in the secondary America weâve been through, of back roads, and Chinamanâs ditches, and Appaloosa horses, and sweeping mountain ranges, and meditative thoughts, and kids with pinecones and bumblebees and open sky above us mile after mile after mile, all through that, what was real, what was around us dominated. And so there wasnât much feeling of loneliness. Thatâs the way it must have been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Hardly any people and hardly any loneliness. Iâm undoubtedly over-generalizing, but if the proper qualifications were introduced it would be true. Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devicesâŠTV, jets, freeways and so onâŠbut I hope itâs been made plain that the real evil isnât the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. Itâs the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil. Thatâs why I went to so much trouble to show how technology could be used to destroy the evil. A person who knows how to fix motorcyclesâŠwith QualityâŠis less likely to run short of friends than one who doesnât. And they arenât going to see him as some kind of object either. Quality destroys objectivity every time.
Or if he takes whatever dull job heâs stuck withâŠand they are all, sooner or later, dullâŠand, just to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, heâs likely to discover that he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people around him because his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, but others too because the Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didnât think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going.
My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and thatâs all. God, I donât want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out. These can be left alone for a while. Thereâs a place for them but theyâve got to be built on a foundation of Quality within the individuals involved. Weâve had that individual Quality in the past, exploited it as a natural resource without knowing it, and now itâs just about depleted. Everyoneâs just about out of gumption. And I think itâs about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resourceâŠindividual worth. There are political reactionaries whoâve been saying something close to this for years. Iâm not one of them, but to the extent theyâre talking about real individual worth and not just an excuse for giving more money to the rich, theyâre right. We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance and old-fashioned gumption. We really do. I hope that in this Chautauqua some directions have been pointed to.
The intermittent failure setback is next. In this the thing that is wrong becomes right all of a sudden just as you start to fix it. Electrical short circuits are often in this class. The short occurs only when the machineâs bouncing around. As soon as you stop everythingâs okay. Itâs almost impossible to fix it then. All you can do is try to get it to go wrong again and if it wonât, forget it. Intermittents become gumption traps when they fool you into thinking youâve really got the machine fixed. Itâs always a good idea on any job to wait a few hundred miles before coming to that conclusion. Theyâre discouraging when they crop up again and again, but when they do youâre no worse off than someone who goes to a commercial mechanic. In fact youâre better off. Theyâre much more of a gumption trap for the owner who has to drive his machine to the shop again and again and never get satisfaction. On your own machine you can study them over a long period of time, something a commercial mechanic canât do, and you can just carry around the tools you think youâll need until the intermittent happens again, and then, when it happens, stop and work on it. When intermittents recur, try to correlate them with other things the cycle is doing. Do the misfires, for example, occur only on bumps, only on turns, only on acceleration? Only on hot days? These correlations are clues for cause-and-effect hypotheses. In some intermittents you have to resign yourself to a long fishing expedition, but no matter how tedious that gets itâs never as tedious as taking the machine to a commercial mechanic five times. Iâm tempted to go into long detail about âIntermittents I Have Knownâ with a blow-by-blow description of how these were solved. But this gets like those fishing stories, of interest mainly to the fisherman, who doesnât quite catch on to why everybody yawns. He enjoyed it. Next to misassemblies and intermittents I think the most common external gumption trap is the parts setback. Here a person who does his own work can get depressed in a number of ways. Parts are something you never plan on buying when you originally get the machine. Dealers like to keep their inventories small. Wholesalers are slow and always understaffed in the spring when everybody buys motorcycle parts. The pricing on parts is the second part of this gumption trap. Itâs a well-known industrial policy to price the original equipment competitively, because the customer can always go somewhere else, but on parts to overprice and clean up. The price of the part is not only jacked up way beyond its new price; you get a special price because youâre not a commercial mechanic. This is a sly arrangement that allows the commercial mechanic to get rich by putting in parts that arenât needed. One more hurdle yet. The part may not fit. Parts lists always contain mistakes. Make and model changes are confusing. Out-of-tolerance parts runs sometimes get through quality control because thereâs no operating checkout at the factory. Some of the parts you buy are made by specialty houses who donât have access to the engineering data needed to make them right. Sometimes they get confused about make and model changes. Sometimes the parts man youâre dealing with jots down the wrong number. Sometimes you donât give him the right identification. But itâs always a major gumption trap to get all the way home and discover that a new part wonât work. The parts traps may be overcome by a combination of a number of techniques. First, if thereâs more than one supplier in town by all means choose the one with the most cooperative parts man. Get to know him on a first-name basis. Often he will have been a mechanic once himself and can provide a lot of information you need. Keep an eye out for price cutters and give them a try. Some of them have good deals. Auto stores and mail-order houses frequently stock the commoner cycle parts at prices way below those of the cycle dealers. You can buy roller chain from chain manufacturers, for example, at way below the inflated cycle-shop prices. Always take the old part with you to prevent getting a wrong part. Take along some machinistâs calipers for comparing dimensions. Finally, if youâre as exasperated as I am by the parts problem and have some money to invest, you can take up the really fascinating hobby of machining your own parts. I have a little 6-by-18-inch lathe with a milling attachment and a full complement of welding equipment: arc, heli-arc, gas and mini-gas for this kind of work. With the welding equipment you can build up worn surfaces with better than original metal and then machine it back to tolerance with carbide tools. You canât really believe how versatile that lathe-plus-milling-plus-welding arrangement is until youâve used it. If you canât do the job directly you can always make something that will do it. The work of machining a part is very slow, and some parts, such as ball bearings, youâre never going to machine, but youâd be amazed at how you can modify parts designs so that you can make them with your equipment, and the work isnât nearly as slow or frustrating as a wait for some smirking parts man to send away to the factory. And the work is gumption building, not gumption destroying. To run a cycle with parts in it youâve made yourself gives you a special feeling you canât possibly get from strictly store-bought parts.
Well, those were the commonest setbacks I can think of: out-of-sequence reassembly, intermittent failure and parts problems. But although setbacks are the commonest gumption traps theyâre only the external cause of gumption loss. Time now to consider some of the internal gumption traps that operate at the same time. As the course description of gumptionology indicated, this internal part of the field can be broken down into three main types of internal gumption traps: those that block affective understanding, called âvalue trapsâ; those that block cognitive understanding, called âtruth trapsâ; and those that block psychomotor behavior, called âmuscle traps.â The value traps are by far the largest and the most dangerous group. Of the value traps, the most widespread and pernicious is value rigidity. This is an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to previous values. In motorcycle maintenance, you must rediscover what you do as you go. Rigid values make this impossible. The typical situation is that the motorcycle doesnât work. The facts are there but you donât see them. Youâre looking right at them, but they donât yet have enough value. This is what Phaedrus was talking about. Quality, value, creates the subjects and objects of the world. The facts do not exist until value has created them. If your values are rigid you canât really learn new facts. This often shows up in premature diagnosis, when youâre sure you know what the trouble is, and then when it isnât, youâre stuck. Then youâve got to find some new clues, but before you can find them youâve got to clear your head of old opinions. If youâre plagued with value rigidity you can fail to see the real answer even when itâs staring you right in the face because you canât see the new answerâs importance. The birth of a new fact is always a wonderful thing to experience. Itâs dualistically called a âdiscoveryâ because of the presumption that it has an existence independent of anyoneâs awareness of it. When it comes along, it always has, at first, a low value. Then, depending on the value-looseness of the observer and the potential quality of the fact, its value increases, either slowly or rapidly, or the value wanes and the fact disappears. The overwhelming majority of facts, the sights and sounds that are around us every second and the relationships among them and everything in our memory⊠these have no Quality, in fact have a negative quality. If they were all present at once our consciousness would be so jammed with meaningless data we couldnât think or act. So we preselect on the basis of Quality, or, to put it Phaedrusâ way, the track of Quality preselects what data weâre going to be conscious of, and it makes this selection in such a way as to best harmonize what we are with what we are becoming. What you have to do, if you get caught in this gumption trap of value rigidity, is slow down⊠youâre going to have to slow down anyway whether you want to or not⊠but slow down deliberately and go over ground that youâve been over before to see if the things you thought were important were really important and to - well - just stare at the machine. Thereâs nothing wrong with that. Just live with it for a while. Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long, as sure as you live, youâll get a little nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if youâre interested in it. Thatâs the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it. At first try to understand this new fact not so much in terms of your big problem as for its own sake. That problem may not be as big as you think it is. And that fact may not be as small as you think it is. It may not be the fact you want but at least you should be very sure of that before you send the fact away. Often before you send it away you will discover it has friends who are right next to it and are watching to see what your response is. Among the friends may be the exact fact you are looking for. After a while you may find that the nibbles you get are more interesting than your original purpose of fixing the machine. When that happens youâve reached a kind of point of arrival. Then youâre no longer strictly a motorcycle mechanic, youâre also a motorcycle scientist, and youâve completely conquered the gumption trap of value rigidity.
I keep wanting to go back to that analogy of fishing for facts. I can just see somebody asking with great frustration, âYes, but which facts do you fish for? Thereâs got to be more to it than that.â But the answer is that if you know which facts youâre fishing for youâre no longer fishing. Youâve caught them. Iâm trying to think of a specific example. All kinds of examples from cycle maintenance could be given, but the most striking example of value rigidity I can think of is the old South Indian Monkey Trap, which depends on value rigidity for its effectiveness. The trap consists of a hollowed-out coconut chained to a stake. The coconut has some rice inside which can be grabbed through a small hole. The hole is big enough so that the monkeyâs hand can go in, but too small for his fist with rice in it to come out. The monkey reaches in and is suddenly trappedâŠby nothing more than his own value rigidity. He canât revalue the rice. He cannot see that freedom without rice is more valuable than capture with it. The villagers are coming to get him and take him away. Theyâre coming closer - closer! - now! What general advice⊠not specific advice⊠but what general advice would you give the poor monkey in circumstances like this? Well, I think you might say exactly what Iâve been saying about value rigidity, with perhaps a little extra urgency. There is a fact this monkey should know: if he opens his hand heâs free. But how is he going to discover this fact? By removing the value rigidity that rates rice above freedom. How is he going to do that? Well, he should somehow try to slow down deliberately and go over ground that he has been over before and see if things he thought were important really were important and, well, stop yanking and just stare at the coconut for a while. Before long he should get a nibble from a little fact wondering if he is interested in it. He should try to understand this fact not so much in terms of his big problem as for its own sake. That problem may not be as big as he thinks it is. That fact may not be as small as he thinks it is either. Thatâs about all the general information you can give him.
The next one is important. Itâs the internal gumption trap of ego. Ego isnât entirely separate from value rigidity but one of the many causes of it. If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened. Your ego isolates you from the Quality reality. When the facts show that youâve just goofed, youâre not as likely to admit it. When false information makes you look good, youâre likely to believe it. On any mechanical repair job ego comes in for rough treatment. Youâre always being fooled, youâre always making mistakes, and a mechanic who has a big ego to defend is at a terrific disadvantage. If you know enough mechanics to think of them as a group, and your observations coincide with mine, I think youâll agree that mechanics tend to be rather modest and quiet. There are exceptions, but generally if theyâre not quiet and modest at first, the work seems to make them that way. And skeptical. Attentive, but skeptical, But not egoistic. Thereâs no way to bullshit your way into looking good on a mechanical repair job, except with someone who doesnât know what youâre doing. I was going to say that the machine doesnât respond to your personality, but it does respond to your personality. Itâs just that the personality that it responds to is your real personality, the one that genuinely feels and reasons and acts, rather than any false, blown-up personality images your ego may conjure up. These false images are deflated so rapidly and completely youâre bound to be very discouraged very soon if youâve derived your gumption from ego rather than Quality. If modesty doesnât come easily or naturally to you, one way out of this trap is to fake the attitude of modesty anyway. If you just deliberately assume youâre not much good, then your gumption gets a boost when the facts prove this assumption is correct. This way you can keep going until the time comes when the facts prove this assumption is incorrect. Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. Youâre so sure youâll do everything wrong youâre afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than âlaziness,â is the real reason you find it hard to get started. This gumption trap of anxiety, which results from overmotivation, can lead to all kinds of errors of excessive fussiness. You fix things that donât need fixing, and chase after imaginary ailments. You jump to wild conclusions and build all kinds of errors into the machine because of your own nervousness. These errors, when made, tend to confirm your original underestimation of yourself. This leads to more errors, which lead to more underestimation, in a self-stoking cycle. The best way to break this cycle, I think, is to work out your anxieties on paper. Read every book and magazine you can on the subject. Your anxiety makes this easy and the more you read the more you calm down. You should remember that itâs peace of mind youâre after and not just a fixed machine. When beginning a repair job you can list everything youâre going to do on little slips of paper which you then organize into proper sequence. You discover that you organize and then reorganize the sequence again and again as more and more ideas come to you. The time spent this way usually more than pays for itself in time saved on the machine and prevents you from doing fidgety things that create problems later on. You can reduce your anxiety somewhat by facing the fact that there isnât a mechanic alive who doesnât louse up a job once in a while. The main difference between you and the commercial mechanics is that when they do it you donât hear about it⊠just pay for it, in additional costs prorated through all your bills. When you make the mistakes yourself, you at ]east get the benefit of some education. Boredom is the next gumption trap that comes to mind. This is the opposite of anxiety and commonly goes with ego problems. Boredom means youâre off the Quality track, youâre not seeing things freshly, youâve lost your âbeginnerâs mindâ and your motorcycle is in great danger. Boredom means your gumption supply is low and must be replenished before anything else is done. When youâre bored, stop! Go to a show. Turn on the TV. Call it a day. Do anything but work on that machine. If you donât stop, the next thing that happens is the Big Mistake, and then all the boredom plus the Big Mistake combine together in one Sunday punch to knock all the gumption out of you and you are really stopped. My favorite cure for boredom is sleep. Itâs very easy to get to sleep when bored and very hard to get bored after a long rest. My next favorite is coffee. I usually keep a pot plugged in while working on the machine. If these donât work it may mean deeper Quality problems are bothering you and distracting you from whatâs before you. The boredom is a signal that you should turn your attention to these problemsâŠthatâs what youâre doing anywayâŠand control them before continuing on the motorcycle. For me the most boring task is cleaning the machine. It seems like such a waste of time. It just gets dirty again the first time you ride it. John always kept his BMW spic and span. It really did look nice, while mineâs always a little ratty, it seems. Thatâs the classical mind at work, runs fine inside but looks dingy on the surface. One solution to boredom on certain kinds of jobs such as greasing and oil changing and tuning is to turn them into a kind of ritual. Thereâs an esthetic to doing things that are unfamiliar and another esthetic to doing things that are familiar. I have heard that there are two kinds of welders: production welders, who donât like tricky setups and enjoy doing the same thing over and over again; and maintenance welders, who hate it when they have to do the same job twice. The advice was that if you hire a welder make sure which kind he is, because theyâre not interchangeable. Iâm in that latter class, and thatâs probably why I enjoy troubleshooting more than most and dislike cleaning more than most. But I can do both when I have to and so can anyone else. When cleaning I do it the way people go to churchâŠnot so much to discover anything new, although Iâm alert for new things, but mainly to reacquaint myself with the familiar. Itâs nice sometimes to go over familiar paths. Zen has something to say about boredom. Its main practice of âjust sittingâ has got to be the worldâs most boring activityâŠunless itâs that Hindu practice of being buried alive. You donât do anything much; not move, not think, not care. What could be more boring? Yet in the center of all this boredom is the very thing Zen Buddhism seeks to teach. What is it? What is it at the very center of boredom that youâre not seeing. Impatience is close to boredom but always results from one cause: an underestimation of the amount of time the job will take. You never really know what will come up and very few jobs get done as quickly as planned. Impatience is the first reaction against a setback and can soon turn to anger if youâre not careful. Impatience is best handled by allowing an indefinite time for the job, particularly new jobs that require unfamiliar techniques; by doubling the allotted time when circumstances force time planning; and by scaling down the scope of what you want to do. Overall goals must be scaled down in importance and immediate goals must be scaled up. This requires value flexibility, and the value shift is usually accompanied by some loss of gumption, but itâs a sacrifice that must be made. Itâs nothing like the loss of gumption that will occur if a Big Mistake caused by impatience occurs. My favorite scaling-down exercise is cleaning up nuts and bolts and studs and tapped holes.
Iâve got a phobia about crossed or jimmied or rust-jammed or dirt-jammed threads that cause nuts to turn slow or hard; and when I find one, I take its dimensions with a thread gauge and calipers, get out the taps and dies, recut the threads on it, then examine it and oil it and I have a whole new perspective on patience. Another one is cleaning up tools that have been used and not put away and are cluttering up the place. This is a good one because one of the first warning signs of impatience is frustration at not being able to lay your hand on the tool you need right away. If you just stop and put tools away neatly you will both find the tool and also scale down your impatience without wasting time or endangering the work.
Well, that about does it for value traps. Thereâs a whole lot more of them, of course. Iâve really only just touched on the subject to show whatâs there. Almost any mechanic could fill you in for hours on value traps heâs discovered that I donât know anything about. Youâre bound to discover plenty of them for yourself on almost every job. Perhaps the best single thing to learn is to recognize a value trap when youâre in it and work on that before you continue on the machine.
Truth traps are concerned with data that are apprehended and are within the boxcars of the train. For the most part these data are properly handled by conventional dualistic logic and the scientific method talked about earlier, back just after Miles City. But thereâs one trap that isnâtâŠthe truth trap of yes-no logic. Yes and no â this or that â one or zero. On the basis of this elementary two-term discrimination, all human knowledge is built up. The demonstration of this is the computer memory which stores all its knowledge in the form of binary information. It contains ones and zeros, thatâs all. Because weâre unaccustomed to it, we donât usually see that thereâs a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We donât even have a term for it, so Iâll have to use the Japanese mu. Mu means âno thing.â Like âQualityâ it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, âNo class; not one, not zero, not yes, not no.â It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. âUnask the questionâ is what it says. Mu becomes appropriate when the context of the question becomes too small for the truth of the answer. When the Zen monk Joshu was asked whether a dog had a Buddha nature he said âMu,â meaning that if he answered either way he was answering incorrectly. The Buddha nature cannot be captured by yes or no questions. That mu exists in the natural world investigated by science is evident. Itâs just that, as usual, weâre trained not to see it by our heritage. For example, itâs stated over and over again that computer circuits exhibit only two states, a voltage for âoneâ and a voltage for âzero.â Thatâs silly. Any computer-electronics technician knows otherwise. Try to find a voltage representing one or zero when the power is off! The circuits are in a mu state. They arenât at one, they arenât at zero, theyâre in an indeterminate state that has no meaning in terms of ones or zeros. Readings of the voltmeter will show, in many cases, âfloating groundâ characteristics, in which the technician isnât reading characteristics of the computer circuits at all but characteristics of the voltmeter itself. Whatâs happened is that the power-off condition is part of a context larger than the context in which the one zero states are considered universal. The question of one or zero has been âunasked.â And there are plenty of other computer conditions besides a power-off condition in which mu answers are found because of larger contexts than the one-zero universality. The dualistic mind tends to think of mu occurrences in nature as a kind of contextual cheating, or irrelevance, but mu is found throughout all scientific investigation, and nature doesnât cheat, and natureâs answers are never irrelevant. Itâs a great mistake, a kind of dishonesty, to sweep natureâs mu answers under the carpet. Recognition and valuatian of these answers would do a lot to bring logical theory closer to experimental practice. Every laboratory scientist knows that very often his experimental results provide mu answers to the yes-no questions the experiments were designed for. In these cases he considers the experiment poorly designed, chides himself for stupidity and at best considers the âwastedâ experiment which has provided the mu answer to be a kind of wheel-spinning which might help prevent mistakes in the design of future yes-no experiments. This low evaluation of the experiment which provided the mu answer isnât justified. The mu answer is an important one. Itâs told the scientist that the context of his question is too small for natureâs answer and that he must enlarge the context of the question. That is a very important answer! His understanding of nature is tremendously improved by it, which was the purpose of the experiment in the first place. A very strong case can be made for the statement that science grows by its mu answers more than by its yes or no answer. Yes or no confirms or denies a hypothesis. Mu says the answer is beyond the hypothesis. Mu is the âphenomenonâ that inspires scientific enquiry in the first place! Thereâs nothing mysterious or esoteric about it. Itâs just that our culture has warped us to make a low value judgment of it. In motorcycle maintenance the mu answer given by the machine to many of the diagnostic questions put to it is a major cause of gumption loss. It shouldnât be! When your answer to a test is indeterminate it means one of two things: that your test procedures arenât doing what you think they are or that your understanding of the context of the question needs to be enlarged. Check your tests and restudy the question. Donât throw away those mu answers! Theyâre every bit as vital as the yes or no answers. Theyâre more vital. Theyâre the ones you grow on!
The mu expansion is the only thing I want to say about truth traps at this time. Time to switch to the psychomotor traps. This is the domain of understanding which is most directly related to what happens to the machine. Here by far the most frustrating gumption trap is inadequate tools. Nothingâs quite so demoralizing as a tool hang-up. Buy good tools as you can afford them and youâll never regret it. If you want to save money donât overlook the newspaper want ads. Good tools, as a rule, donât wear out, and good secondhand tools are much better than inferior new ones. Study the tool catalogs. You can learn a lot from them. Apart from bad tools, bad surroundings are a major gumption trap. Pay attention to adequate lighting. Itâs amazing the number of mistakes a little light can prevent. Some physical discomfort is unpreventable, but a lot of it, such as that which occurs in surroundings that are too hot or too cold, can throw your evaluations way off if you arenât careful. If youâre too cold, for example, youâll hurry and probably make mistakes. If youâre too hot your anger threshold gets much lower. Avoid out-of-position work when possible. A small stool on either side of the cycle will increase your patience greatly and youâll be much less likely to damage the assemblies youâre working on. Thereâs one psychomotor gumption trap, muscular insensitivity, which accounts for some real damage. It results in part from lack of kinesthesia, a failure to realize that although the externals of a cycle are rugged, inside the engine are delicate precision parts which can be easily damaged by muscular insensitivity. Thereâs whatâs called âmechanicâs feel,â which is very obvious to those who know what it is, but hard to describe to those who donât; and when you see someone working on a machine who doesnât have it, you tend to suffer with the machine. The mechanicâs feel comes from a deep inner kinesthetic feeling for the elasticity of materials. Some materials, like ceramics, have very little, so that when you thread a porcelain fitting youâre very careful not to apply great pressures. Other materials, like steel, have tremendous elasticity, more than rubber, but in a range in which, unless youâre working with large mechanical forces, the elasticity isnât apparent. With nuts and bolts youâre in the range of large mechanical forces and you should understand that within these ranges metals are elastic. When you take up a nut thereâs a point called âfinger-tightâ where thereâs contact but no takeup of elasticity. Then thereâs âsnug,â in which the easy surface elasticity is taken up. Then thereâs a range called âtight,â in which all the elasticity is taken up. The force required to reach these three points is different for each size of nut and bolt, and different for lubricated bolts and for locknuts. The forces are different for steel and cast iron and brass and aluminum and plastics and ceramics. But a person with mechanicâs feel knows when somethingâs tight and stops. A person without it goes right on past and strips the threads or breaks the assembly. A âmechanicâs feelâ implies not only an understanding for the elasticity of metal but for its softness. The insides of a motorcycle contain surfaces that are precise in some cases to as little as one ten-thousandth of an inch. If you drop them or get dirt on them or scratch them or bang them with a hammer theyâll lose that precision. Itâs important to understand that the metal behind the surfaces can normally take great shock and stress but that the surfaces themselves cannot. When handling precision parts that are stuck or difficult to manipulate, a person with mechanicâs feel will avoid damaging the surfaces and work with his tools on the nonprecision surfaces of the same part whenever possible.
If he must work on the surfaces themselves, heâll always use softer surfaces to work them with. Brass hammers, plastic hammers, wood hammers, rubber hammers and lead hammers are all available for this work. Use them. Vise jaws can be fitted with plastic and copper and lead faces. Use these too. Handle precision parts gently. Youâll never be sorry. If you have a tendency to bang things around, take more time and try to develop a little more respect for the accomplishment that a precision part represents.
Maybe itâs just the usual late afternoon letdown, but after all Iâve said about all these things today I just have a feeling that Iâve somehow talked around the point. Some could ask, âWell, if I get around all those gumption traps, then will I have the thing licked?â The answer, of course, is no, you still havenât got anything licked. Youâve got to live right too. Itâs the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? Itâs easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. Thatâs the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isnât separate from the rest of your existence. If youâre a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you arenât working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together. But if youâre a sloppy thinker six days a week and you really try to be sharp on the seventh, then maybe the next six days arenât going to be quite as sloppy as the preceding six. What Iâm trying to come up with on these gumption traps I guess, is shortcuts to living right. The real cycle youâre working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be âout thereâ and the person that appears to be âin hereâ are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.
I watch the cars go by for a while on the highway. Something lonely about them. Not lonelyâŠworse. Nothing. Like the attendantâs expression when he filled the tank. Nothing. A nothing curb, by some nothing gravel, at a nothing intersection, going nowhere. Something about the car drivers too. They look just like the gasoline attendant, staring straight ahead in some private trance of their own. I havenât seen that since â since Sylvia noticed it the first day. They all look like theyâre in a funeral procession. Once in a while one gives a quick glance and then looks away expressionlessly, as if minding his own business, as if embarrassed that we might have noticed he was looking at us. I see it now because weâve been away from it for a long time. The driving is different too. The cars seem to be moving at a steady maximum speed for in-town driving, as though they want to get somewhere, as though whatâs here right now is just something to get through. The drivers seem to be thinking about where they want to be rather than where they are. I know what it is! Weâve arrived at the West Coast! Weâre all strangers again! Folks, I just forgot the biggest gumption trap of all. The funeral procession! The one everybodyâs in, this hyped-up, fuck-you, supermodern, ego style of life that thinks it owns this country. Weâve been out of it for so long Iâd forgotten all about it.
We see much more of this loneliness now. Itâs paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas youâd think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didnât see it so much. The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. Itâs psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here itâs reversed. Itâs the primary America weâre in. It hit the night before last in Prineville Junction and itâs been with us ever since. Thereâs this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of whatâs immediately around them. The media have convinced them that whatâs right around them is unimportant. And thatâs why theyâre lonely. You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, youâre just a kind of an object. You donât count. Youâre not what theyâre looking for. Youâre not on TV. But in the secondary America weâve been through, of back roads, and Chinamanâs ditches, and Appaloosa horses, and sweeping mountain ranges, and meditative thoughts, and kids with pinecones and bumblebees and open sky above us mile after mile after mile, all through that, what was real, what was around us dominated. And so there wasnât much feeling of loneliness. Thatâs the way it must have been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Hardly any people and hardly any loneliness. Iâm undoubtedly over-generalizing, but if the proper qualifications were introduced it would be true. Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devicesâŠTV, jets, freeways and so onâŠbut I hope itâs been made plain that the real evil isnât the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. Itâs the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil. Thatâs why I went to so much trouble to show how technology could be used to destroy the evil. A person who knows how to fix motorcyclesâŠwith QualityâŠis less likely to run short of friends than one who doesnât. And they arenât going to see him as some kind of object either. Quality destroys objectivity every time.
Or if he takes whatever dull job heâs stuck withâŠand they are all, sooner or later, dullâŠand, just to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, heâs likely to discover that he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people around him because his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, but others too because the Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didnât think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going.
My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and thatâs all. God, I donât want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out. These can be left alone for a while. Thereâs a place for them but theyâve got to be built on a foundation of Quality within the individuals involved. Weâve had that individual Quality in the past, exploited it as a natural resource without knowing it, and now itâs just about depleted. Everyoneâs just about out of gumption. And I think itâs about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resourceâŠindividual worth. There are political reactionaries whoâve been saying something close to this for years. Iâm not one of them, but to the extent theyâre talking about real individual worth and not just an excuse for giving more money to the rich, theyâre right. We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance and old-fashioned gumption. We really do. I hope that in this Chautauqua some directions have been pointed to.