I'm not all that convinced our most enlightened are all that bright either.

To culture, good and bad are some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, while in nature, it's the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental, the 1/0 of sentience. That's because the function of culture is to get society functioning as a single organism, for better or worse.

Consider democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures, the many as one. To the Ancients, monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. Rome adopted and co-opted a monotheistic sect as the empire solidified and remnants of the Republic faded. All about The Big Guy Rules.

Though 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 images on it.

Ideals are not absolutes and an entire culture founded on the principle will naturally be contentious, as the multitudes of ideals/gods compete.

You would think the philosophers would have been all over that centuries ago, but we tend to have a monolithic point of view in an essentially dualistic reality. So the two sides of the issues each see themselves as right and the other side as misbegotten fools. Try imagining a society where there are not both liberal and conservative elements. The anarchies of desire, versus the tyrannies of judgment. The heart and the head.

Is money a social contract, enabling the economy, or a commodity to mine from it? The medium has become the message.

Is time the point of the present moving past to future, or change, turning future to past?

We all might be idiots, but that includes the more smug among us as well.