I think we need to step back and look at it logically, not just through the veil of religion and ethics.
What you describe with the farmer and the corn is simple, basic feedback. The problem is that people are very linear and goal oriented. It's like we haven't quite processed that the earth is round, not flat. What goes round, comes round.
We do have this narrative based culture, where it is about the ends, rather than the means, whether heaven, or the bottom line. Yet more is not always better. Even when you are playing to win, it still requires balance and judgement. You might say power is the bull, while the matador is art.
Those who feel the need to cheat obviously don't understand the game.
One of the problems is that we conflate the elemental with the aspirational.
A spiritual absolute wouldn't be an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell, but the essence of sentience, from which we rise. The fact we are aware, than the details of which we are aware.
When we assume the ideal to be elemental, than there can be no live and let live, as the Other is a rebuke to our own one True God.
Good and bad are elemental. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken.
While ideals are aspirational. "Life liberty and the pursuit of happiness," is an ideal, which we seek.
Confusing the two means there is no nuance and any conflict becomes polarized, between us versus them.
Society will always be that tension between the anarchies of desire and the tyranny of judgement. The heart and the head. Motor and steering.
Those seeking to transcend convention and culture, versus those seeking to sustain and re-enforce it. Liberals and conservatives.
Which is an overall cycle of expansion and cosolidation, like the seasons.
Yet since we have this culture of monist idealism, both sides see themselves on the road to nirvana and the other as ignorant fools.
Which the powers that be seem intent on using to foment a civil war, to forestall a revolution, as they have highjacked the economic circulation system to siphon all value out of everything and everybody. As our religion of money is necessarily built on an economy of debt, but that's another issue....
