John Brodix Merryman Jr.
1 min readApr 27, 2024

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A big part of the problem is the degree to which most people seem unwilling to even consider the abstractions defining and structuring our societies. The result is torrents of noise, with little connectivity. Towers of Babel.

In terms of simply good and bad, cultures tend to treat it as a cosmic conflict between righteousness and evil, while in nature, it is the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience.

So culture is about the stories we tell the children to get them to behave, while nature is some enormous computer that doesn't always come up with the answers we want to hear.

Morality is not an absolute, since if it was, it couldn't be transgressed, like a temperature below absolute zero. Morals are the ideals, habits, behaviors that enable a healthy society.

How about monotheism? The core codes, heroes, narratives at the gravitational center of every society are ideals, not absolutes.

The universal is the elemental, so a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The light shining through and illuminating the film, not the stories playing out on it.

I could go on, but as you imply, people just don't want to be bothered.

The fact is that we really haven't internalized the implications of the earth being round, not flat.

We are linear, goal oriented organisms in a cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality.

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John Brodix Merryman Jr.
John Brodix Merryman Jr.

Written by John Brodix Merryman Jr.

Having an affair with life. It's complicated.

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