Paul,

The problem is that while society senses the dynamics at work, between the emotions, desires and impulses driving people, versus the fact decisions and judgements have to be made as to which to empower and which to resist, it isn't explicitly laid out in our cultural foundations and text.

We are the tension between desire and judgement, the heart and the head. We all want lots of things, but we have to pick and chose. We can't take both sides of the fork in the road. We might see that cheesecake and the tastebuds go, YES! The stomach goes, oh, maybe. The head says, wait for after dinner.

Politics is the social organism going through an analogous sorting process.

We live in this consumer culture, where every want, need, impulse, desire, etc is promoted and glorified, as a way to sell something, be it a product, or a political movement. Nobody ever made any money telling people to resist the urge.

Our primary religious paradigm is monotheism and while it might argue this life is a test, it still assumes there is one unified state, towards which we are all going, but that is a fallacy. 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 fact we are aware, than the many details of which we are aware.

The conceptual consequence is that society comes to conflate the ideal, which is aspirational, with the absolute, which is elemental. So all the movements seeking to replace monotheism and its political expression of monarchy, all assume their ideals and aspirations to be universal and beyond question, rather than unique expressions of time and place.

There can be no live and let live, if the Other is a sin against one's own True God.

The reality is more the dichotomy and duality of yin and yang, than the singularity of Almighty God. Be it the energy of youth, versus the wisdom of age, the social expansionism of liberalism, versus the civil and cultural consolidation of conservatism, etc. Even matter is more the polarity of positive and negative chanrge, than any base substance.

So we do have a civilization that has been borrowing from the future, because it has no other model than the ends justify the means, but now that future is arriving and the kids have no other model than to take what they can and screw everyone else, because that's how the system they grew up in is run.

The kids may be dumb, but we still need to look in the mirror.