Isn't America just humanity washing up against the edge of the global petri dish?
We are linear, goal oriented creatures in a cyclical, reciprocal, feedback generated reality and this 'go forth and multiply' paradigm is reaching its limits.
Capitalism is not synonymous with free markets. Markets need money to circulate, while people see it as the signal to extract and store, requiring ever more to be added and ever more metastatic ways to store what has been extracted.
It should be obvious to all, that the capital markets couldn't function without the government siphoning up trillions in surplus money, which then gets spent blowing up third world countries. The secret sauce of capitalism is that public debt backs private wealth.
There isn’t nearly sufficient investment potential to save the amounts we feel necessary, so we will eventually have to re-invent the idea of the public commons, as a store of public wealth. Which is not socialism as it’s portrayed, but the fact that a healthy society needs both public and private functions.
Government was private once, but few see monarchy as a good idea anymore.
The value circulation mechanism of finance is currently having its “Let them eat cake.” moment, so banking will have to be re-invented as a form of public utility, as well. As a medium of exchange, money is a contract between the individual and society, not a commodity. We own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water passing through our bodies.
Underlaying it all is the premise of monotheism.
Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which life rises, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which it fell. Consciousness seeking knowledge, than any form or brand of it.
Several thousand years ago this father figure lawgiver was a useful narrative device to instill respect for the culture into a constantly regenerating population, but it does conflate the absolute with the ideal. One is aspirational, the other is elemental.
If a culture is to presume its aspirations are absolute, what is to stop any social ideal from asserting its universal totality? From the Terrors of the French Revolution, to the Stalinist purges, to the god of the bottom line, to the current cancel culture, there is no debate or nuance allowed, when ideals are at stake.
Hopefully humanity is more toward the end of the beginning, than the beginning of the end, but it's likely most of us will be dead of old age, if not any number of other reasons, before the dust has settled on this phase.
