Having grown up around more horses and cattle, than people, I've tended to have an outsiders view on culture and over the years, come across a fair number of points that should be obvious, but since formal education amounts to a game of telephone whispers, going back to the dawn of civilization, it seems everyone gets caught up in the same premises.

For example, culture tends to view good and bad as some cosmic conflict between righteousness and evil, while in nature, it's the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience.

What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken.

The essence of the cultural system is a way to control populations. Carrot and stick. While the reality is an enormously large ongoing computational process. Often too much good can have negative consequences, as well as bad things are often educational in ways good things are not.

Consider monotheism;

The universal is the elemental. So a spiritual absolute is not some ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell, but the essence of sentience, from which we rise. More the light shining through and animating the film, than the stories playing out on it.

Ideals are not absolutes. Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The creeds, codes and heroes around which cultures form are ideals. They are a necessary locus of social structure. Without which, it would dissipate. Tower of Babel.

Yet they are not absolutes. There is no one universal point of focus. Every structure has its locus, and purpose. It is like the grain of sand at the center of the pearl, the eye of the storm. The black hole at the center of the galaxy.

The dynamics driving this might be universal, but the results are subjective.

Morals are not absolute, or they simply could not be transgressed, like a temperature below absolute zero.

They are ideals. The codes of behavior most suited to the health of the community. One of the most basic requirements is collective responsibility. Then rights as reward, for establishing a functioning society. When we reach the stage everyone demands rights, but responsibility is optional, the negative feedback is well on its way to breaking the system apart.

Art looks to the ideals.

Science looks to the elements.

As for science, consider that as these mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the point of the present, moving past to future. It is the basis of human culture and thus civilization, as narrative and the sciences codify it as measures of duration.

The evident reality, for those of us dealing with nature on her own terms, is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

The energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated coalesce and dissolve, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while perceptions, emotions and thoughts go future to past.

Though it is the digestive system processing the energy and feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the information and the circulation system is feedback in the middle.

Considering that galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in, it would seem a universal dynamic.

How about determinism? The act of determination can only occur as the present. The future has not yet been fully computed.

How about Economics?

It would seem the medium of money has become the current locus of civilization, so we issue enormous amounts, necessarily backed by increasingly unsupportable debt.

As these linear, goal oriented organisms in a cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, people see money as signal to save and store, while markets need it to circulate, so Econ 101 describes it as both medium of exchange and store of value.

In the body, blood is the medium, fat is the store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store. Would the average 5 year old be able to understand the difference?

I could list a fair number of other points, but it seems most people are either unable or unwilling to look outside the boxes their minds are trained for.

Especially those with advanced degrees.