How far down into the paradigm do you want to dig?
Paradigms are the structure we build to explain and define reality and while they consequently limit our reality, they also create it. Like language.
The problem is when we make our tools into gods. Then rather than letting them grow and evolve, as their functions require, they become set in stone and only change reluctantly and spasmodically. (A large spasm appears imminant.)
The problem of morality is that good and bad are not some cosmic duel between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of life. Even bacteria get it. It is foundational, rather aspirational, from which all the higher order emotional and cultural standards evolve, like trust, honor, respect, responsiiblity, love, etc, as well as the negatives, so when this binary becomes the overriding standard, conflicts become a race to the bottom, of us versus them, rather thean each side being able to expect the other to hold to higher, evolved standards and potentially using such situations to further evolve.
Another is that as mobile creatures, with a sequential process of perception and a narrative based culture, we are acculturated to the narrative arc ending in that punchline/pot of literal or figurative gold. Heaven or the bottom line. So ends come to justify means and the rules which enable society to exist are increasingly broken by those who would win at any cost.
The problem with that is that while people are linear and goal oriented, nature is cyclical, reciprocal and feedback generated, so this focus on winning eventually creates massive negative feedback loops, like a hurricane sweeping through a beach town.
The fact is that time is not so much the point of the present, moving past to future, that our minds and culture model it as, but change turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Aka, causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
So those creating the most powerful narratives own the past and use it to control the future. Much as the sun outshines the stars in the daytime.
Though if they overplay their hand, the blowback can become quite vicious.
Take capitalism, for instance; The paradigm is that it is synonymous with a free market economy, yet as nature is cyclical and people are goal oriented, markets need money to circulate, while people see it as the signal to extract and store, from the noise of society and the economy.
Which requires ever more to be added and ever more socially and economically metastatic ways to store what has been extracted. Thus an enormous, bloated financial sector.
Given that much wealth functions as a contract, with the asset backed by a debt, storing the asset requires sufficient debt be generated.
One way is squeezing the amount of money flowing through the necessary economy, causing it to run on debt and drawing that saved money back into circulation.
Which creates a centripetal effect, as postive feedback draws the asset to the center of the community, effectively creating it, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges.
Given money and finance are society's blood and circulation system, to distribute value and resources around the community, the effect is as if the heart told the hands and feet they don't need so much blood and should work harder for what they do get.
As this predatory lending goes to the dawn of civiliation, the Ancients used debt jubilees to reset the process and save society. Reading Michael Hudson, he makes the point that this was actually Jesus's intention. Quite literally, "Forgive them their debts." Damn money changers. As debt jubilees had been neglected for some centuries. Though the narrative was co-opted and we got Catholicism instead. Which Martin Luther tried to reset, but that didn't go far enough either.
The other method of producing debt, common to the modern system, is having the government as debtor of last resort. It should be overwhelmingly obvious that the capital markets could not function, without the government siphoning up trillions in surplus capital, but that is another elephant swept under the rug.
Consequently we can have endless, strategically inept wars and no one is court marshalled and shot, as would be the normal consequence. Just given jobs in the media, as "foreign policy experts."
So their primary function is to spend the money, so that more can be borrowed. The secret sauce of capitalism is that public debt backs private wealth.
As they have seriously overplayed their hand, it will be interesting to see who takes control of the narrative, as I doubt most people really are able to comprehend the underlying dynamic.
Eventually humanity will evolve into the central nervous system of a planetary organism, but that remains way into the future, as we are only just bumping up against the edge of the global petri dish and will likely have to dash ourselves against it a few more times, befor accepting the earth as our one and only source.
