If I may offer up some other ways to peel apart the paradigm, it would be to examine the underlaying monist idealism on which Western culture is based.

While the father figure god has receded, its shadow remains.

The logical fallacy of monotheism is that a spiritual absolute would necessarily be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The fact we are aware, rather than the details of which we are aware.

Consider that all the political ideologies that have sought to replace monotheism and its political expression, monarchy, also conflate their ideals, which are aspirational, with the absolute, which is elemental. While it is initially effective in building momentum to ignore means and focus on ends, treating all blowback as obstacles to overcome, the inevitable consequence is overshoot. From the Terrors of the French Revolution, to the current cancel culture, the presumption becomes that one's ideals and aspirations should be above discussion and debate. Goals beyond the realm of the ordinary.

Unfortunately while people and the narratives defining their lives are linear and goal oriented, nature is cyclical, reciprocal and feedback generated.

It is more the yin and yang of balanced polarities, than God Almighty, of the singular and ultimate destiny.

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 sentience. Even bacteria sense that.

It is from this basis that all the higher order social contructs emerge, like honor, trust, respect, responsibility, love, empathy, etc. Not to mention all the complex negatives.

So when we treat good as aspirational rather than elemental, conflicts do become a race to the bottom, of us versus them, good versus bad. Rather than each side being able to assume the other would hold to the higher order, evolved social structures and potentially using such situations to evolve further.

To go deeper into the nature of being, as these mobille organisms with a sequential process of perception, in order to navigate and a narrative based culture, from sharing stories and the knowledge gained, we assume time to be the point of the present, moving past to future.

The reality is that it's 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 it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is "conserved," because it is the present. Its dynamic creates the effect of time, as well as temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes.

So the energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. In terms of a wave, the energy is what drives it, flowing through, while the patterns, the fluctuations and undulations, rise and fall, come and go.

As consciousness goes past to future, while the patterns generated, the perceptions, thoughts, emotions, come and go, future to past.

As these biological organisms, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system sorts and organizes the forms and information precipitating out. Motor and steering.

Consequently we are motivated by our desires and appetites, while the mind has to referee among them, deciding which to preference, which to tolerate and which to resist. Which goes on at personal, social, cultural and civic levels.

So there will always be that tension between the anarchy of desire and tyranny of judgement. The heart and the head.

The problem is when we have this monist culture which insists on distilling this dynamic of energy and order into a singular destiny. Leaving us with a schizophrenic society, of liberal growth and conservative structures. Each seeing themselves on the road to nirvana and the others as misbegotten fools.

Since this dynamic is also a function of age, the desires of youth do ultimately prevail, but by the time they do, they have been sorted and filtered, leaving the survivors of that cohort as the conservatives which the next generation pushes against.

Cycles.