Akmal,
We do live complex lives in a social framework that gives some function of focus and utility to generations unfolding within it, but it seems evident we are reaching social, economic, environmental limits that are going to cause serious blowback. Given this will push the human reset button in ways barely imaginable, I think the opportunity presents itself to fully examine the various premises on which we operate and would remain unquestioned and unquestionable otherwise.
As intentional, mobile organisms, we experience reality as flashes of perception, as a function of navigating our environment. We then build civilizations out of the collective knowledge gained from our ability to narrate our journeys.
Thus we view time as the point of the present moving from past to future. The reality though, is that change turns future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is only this physical, dynamic state and time emerges from its process, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. The most useful description of this state is not so much the passage of time, but as thermodynamic feedback loops.
Consider that galaxies are energy radiating out, as mass precipitates in. All of reality is the interaction of this dichotomy between energy and the forms it manifests. As individual beings, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems, processing the energy driving us on. Along with the central nervous system to sort through the information precipitating out of this dynamic.
Those most professionally focused on the forms and information tend to overlook or dismiss the energy manifesting it, so try to explain reality entirely in terms of information. As in “It from bit,” or “Order vs. chaos.”
To go back to the issue of time; If two billiard balls strike one another, it creates an event. This event fades into the past, while the physical balls go onto other events. Consequently we can only observe the information emerging from this process and so only see patterns which quickly become past, not so much the process generating it. As our minds function by distilling useful information out of this process, signal from the noise. Otherwise our individual perception is drowned in the sea of activity.
Consider how this dichotomy defines reality; In a factory, the product goes start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. Individual lives go from birth to death, while the process of life goes onto the next generation, shedding the old. As our consciousness goes from prior to succeeding thoughts, as these thoughts rise and fall, like so many waves.
As such, process goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.
Yet being these little mobile, goal oriented creatures, we think the path has some destination and built an ideals based culture out of the assumption there is some more perfect, ideal state toward which we must be destined.
This filters out in any number of ways, from God(s) to Mammon. Yet the absolute, as in any universal state, would be the essence from which we rise, not an ideal state from which we fell and seek to return.
So we are constantly seeking the better self, whether morally, as in better social operating systems, or simply personal goals, wealth, fame, etc. While nature is cyclical, reciprocal and the balance of opposites. The end is punctuation, not destination.
Which gets back to that relationship between energy and form. Whenever a system settles into a pattern, cracks appear in the weak points, as the energy manifesting it continues to bubble up, but this system, viewing them as weak points to be patched over, easily pushes that energy back down. Yet that only increases overall pressure on the system.
While examples of this are many, especially in political processes, as social energies bubble up, aka liberalism, while civil and cultural forms coalesce in, aka conservatism, there are many other examples, being as this is thermodynamics.
One blatant example is economics, where we presume to distill all value down to quanta of currency units. The bottom line.
The reason this belief has gone metastatic is because money functions as a contract, with one side an asset and the other a debt, but we treat it as a commodity to save and store.
As a contract, it makes a very useful medium of exchange, but as a store, every asset has to be backed by a debt.
While economics 101 teaches us money is both medium of exchange and store of value, these are seriously different functions, being that a medium is dynamic, while a store is static. So there is that conflict between energy/process and form/pattern.
In the body, blood is the medium and fat is the store. Would a doctor confuse the two? For cars, roads are the medium and parking lots are the store. Would a highway engineer confuse them?
What we need to realize is that as the money is the medium/accounting device, enabling large societies to function, we own it like we own the section of road we are using, or as biological organisms, which are part of a larger ecosystem, like the water passing through our bodies. No matter how expensive the car, or rare the wine, there is only so much we need of either roads, or fluids.
Currently much of the debt used to back this premise of notational wealth, is government. Public debt used to back private wealth. Much of which is spent unproductively, from welfare to warfare.
Not that welfare is inherently bad, but that it only feeds people, it doesn’t really integrate them into a larger culture, other than that being fertilized by this charity. Making those on the fringes seem unnecessary, or marginal, rather than a front line.
With that is spent on warfare, we are basically blowing up other countries to sustain the value of surplus money.
As the executive and regulatory function, government is the central nervous system of society, from chieftains and elders, to kings and courts, to presidents and legislatures. When private government reached its limits, as kings lost sight of the fact it is a two way street and they served a function to society, in order to be served by it, they were deposed. Currently finance, as the wealth circulation mechanism, is having its Marie Antionette moment. It’s as if the heart is telling the hands and feet they don’t need so much blood and should work harder for what they do get.
Just as a rough answer, what if we were to tax out what is currently borrowed? If it is being lent, it is currently surplus to those holding it. They do have government by the short hairs, so it won’t happen in the current situation, but theoretically, after all the fainting, shrieking and pearl clutching subsides, people would quickly start finding other ways to squirrel away value, other than as bonds.
Now we all save for many of the same reasons; raising children, housing, healthcare, retirement, etc. If ways could be developed to invest in these as community assets, we would have more organically healthy societies. Rather than everyone trying to save for them individually, with their bank accounts as their economic umbilical cord, we would develop a less atomized culture, not mediated quite so much by the financial sector.
I could go on and on, but hopefully this gives you some idea of why we are in the jam we are in and ways to grow out of it.
Not that this generation could mentally accept this level of change, but sowing some seeds for when there is a need for the next paradigm.
