What is Quality?

The part of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance  that I read this week presented a question that I am not all that sure I know how to answer my self: What is quality? The main character goes on about Phaedrus' troubles answering the question himself after being asked if he was teaching quality to his own students. He went on to ask his kids for a 350 word essay on what it was (which seemed like a cop out to not having finished his lecture) and when I tried to answer it i could only come up with a meekly ninety eight words. I think that quality is a made up standard. Its sole purpose is to distinguish the "good" from the "bad". I think that it is brought out by man's innate need for competition. We literally cannot survive without some sort of competition and this idea of "quality" is a "civilized" man's attempt to bring competition into civilization. Essentially, quality is a game where the rules are being made up as the game i being played for the first time/ However, these rules do not favor the general public or any other individual they favor one person, the winner.
I have begun to see a distinct comparison with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Stranger, Notes from the Underground, and Atlas Shrugged. The basic similarity that I find within these four novels is the concept of society's best (and by best I do not mean the wealthiest doctors, lawyers, business men I mean society's smartest people, those with the highest IQs) not being able to be active in the game that society plays. In Atlas we see all of the people that live in Galt's Gulch completely separated from society because the standard of living, the basic principles which society founds itself off of are completely unethical for them. In The Stranger, you have the main character being executed because of his Jesus like character that they are too blind and unaccepting to recognize (which is talked about in Zen when Pirsig discusses the idea of today's people not accepting Jesus if he were to appear before us).  In Notes, we see it in the main character who lives underground everyone listening to their thoughts and how petty and ridiculous they all are. The main character has distanced himself and has made himself live beneath them because he himself cannot function with them.
Talia Akerman