Nodes and networks, organisms and ecosystems, particles and fields.
We obsess over the object, but have lost sight of the context.
Consider democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The family as godhead. To the Ancients, monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. The Romans adopted a monotheistic sect as state religion around the time the Empire was rising from the ashes of the Republic. Basically to validate The Big Guy Rules.
Logically though, a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell.
Ideals are not absolutes and the philosophers should have been all over that centuries ago, but we all still obsess over whatever totem is at the center of our particular belief system, with little regard for the actual context. So is it any wonder society is a mess?
Now our reductionist materialism has devolved into the bottom line as the final arbiter of worth. Yet money functions as a medium. We own it like we own the air, or water, or roads. It's a network function. It would be like the heart telling the hands and feet to go suck dirt, because it's keeping all the blood for itself.
Galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in. As these organisms, we have the digestive system processing the energy driving us on, while the nervous system sorts the information precipitating out and the circulation system is the feedback in the middle. So we are always cycling between the anarchies of desire and the tyrannies of judgement.
The structure pulls in, because it synchronizes, while the energy radiating out, harmonizing across the cosmos.
The fact is, we need to just step back and appreciate the basics, then all the details start to make more sense. The simple is more sublime than the complex.
Generals run armies and specialist is about one rank above private, so when we put the specialists in charge of everything, the effect is this global Tower of Babel, with everyone talking their own languages, past each other.
Yet the kids that would grow up to be generalists are the ones interesting in everything, so that eventually they come to sense how it is all connected, but now they just get diagnosed as attention deficient and medicated until their minds fit back in whatever box they've been assigned.
Eventually humanity will come to see this age as growing pains. We are at best, at an adolescent stage.
