Here are three, time, god and money;
Logically 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 the film, than the narrative projected on it.
Remember democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The family as godhead. The Romans adopted a monotheistic sect as state religion, as the Empire coalesced out of the ashes of the Republic, because it validates the principle of the Big Guy Rules.
Yet ideals are not absolutes. When we have an entire culture founded around that assumption, it is monumentally conflicted, as everyone assumes their ideals to be universal and consequently everyone else is wrong. Fundamentalists seem to come in all shapes and sizes, from the far left, to the far right.
The absolute is essence, the ground state, while the ideal is a goal, a standard, but the reality is multicultural, not monocultural. We not only have different goals, but we need them. Not everything marches to the beat of the same drummer. There are turtles and rabbits.
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. From it we get the narratives that are the basis of civilization and physics codifies it as measures of duration.
Yet the reality is that action and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as events coalesce and dissolve.
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 sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
So the energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, rise and fall. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it is the digestive system processing the energy, the nervous system sorting the information and the circulation system as feedback between the two.
Government, as executive and regulatory function, is the nervous system of society, while the economy is the gut and blood and banking are the medium and circulation system tying it all together.
Given the direct role government plays in making the decisions directing society, humanity has come to understand it should be a form of public utility and not treated as the private business of a family or clique.
Yet when government is public and banking is private, the banks rule, not only because they have less oversight and don't have to plan around elections, but they effectively control the funding of anyone wishing to run for office. Which creates serious problems.
As linear, goal seeking creatures in a cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, people see money as signal to extract and store, while markets need it to circulate. So Econ 101 describes money as both medium of exchange and store of value. Yet one is dynamic, while the other is static. In the body, blood is the medium, while fat, along with bone and muscle are stores. Roads are a medium, while parking lots are store. The hallway is a medium, while the hall closet is a store.
The reality is that money is a contract, not a commodity. To store the asset side, there has to be a debt to back it.
So what banking really serves best as, is a system of accounting, keeping the various assets and obligations sorted, but because we desire to store nearly infinite amounts of money, we need equal amount of debt to back it.
Which has become the one role government is proving really good at, to create public debt to back private wealth.
Consider the Federal debt has been growing since the New Deal, so not only was Roosevelt putting unemployed labor back to work, but unemployed capital, as well. The World War 2 came along, as the greatest public works project in United States history and the die was cast.
As Julius Caesar is reputed to have said, you can do anything with spears, except sit on them. So we find ourselves in ever more misbegotten misadventures all around the world, whose real function seems to be to simply use the war toys we make, than any actual strategic planning. As soon as the funding runs tight, the soldiers and contractors run for the door, while the politicians and their media acolytes start dreaming up some other part of the world to burn down.
Most times in history, the military is a valuable source of national defense and abusing it would create serious consequences for those responsible, but the silly clowns dreaming up these messes just get high paying jobs in the media, promoting the next mess.
This is all because the banks need the debt generated, to create the illusion of stored wealth. Meanwhile any vestige of actual statesmanship has long faded and the stage actors allowed in the roles have devolved into psychopaths, becuase they do have enormous power, but no real authority, or moral responsibility for their actions. They are like delinquent children, having been given matches and gasoline to play with.
Under all this, is that fact that debt doesn't matter, until it does. As anyone with a credit card quickly finds out.
So either we will have to go back to some form of private government, to control the wealthy running amok, as the Russia and China have done, with Putin and Xi as respective CEO's, or we move onto banking as a public utility, as well.
When the medium enabling markets is privately held, we are all tenant farmers to the banks.
