Society is starting to throw a few gears, but it's part of a cycle. Expand, consolidate.

The real question is how many layers will be peeled away, before we reach a point of equilibrium again.

After a few tens of thousands of years going forth and multiplying, the edge of the petri dish does seem to be in sight. Time to look at the cyclical processes and get beyond the goals.

Life is like a sentence. The end is just punctuation. What matters is how well you tie the rest of the story together.

The basis of a healthy society is responsibility, with rights as reward. The Tragedy of the Commons is when rights are universal and responsibilities are optional.

Yet most of the conversation is about rights, not responsibilities. When our country was first being imagined, the irresponsible were likely to starve, so it was taken for granted that we would be responsible, so the conversations were about apportioning rights.

Safe to say, the situation will have to get a bit tougher, before that becomes apparent again.

Consider that a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the light shining through the film, than the images on it.

Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures, as they expressed a multicultural view. To the Ancients, monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. The formative experience for Judaism was the forty years in the desert, giving us the Ten Commandments.

For the Greeks, the basis of their religion had been renewal. The son born in the spring, of the sky god and earth mother. Yet by the classic period, tradition had taken over and it became set in stone, with the Olympians, as Zeus didn't give way to Dionysus.

So the original appeal of Christianity was the story of Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection was born of an instinct to get back to the cycle. Thus the meaning of the Trinity.

Yet Rome adopted and essentially co-opted it as a state religion, because the Republic was long past and the Empire sought the validation of a monotheistic religion. All about the Big Guy in charge.

Consequently the default political system for the next 1500 years was monarchy. When the West went back to more broad based systems, it required the separation of church and state, essentially culture and civics.

I know this is getting long winded, but it is just a hint of how much clutter there is in the collective attic, that needs sorting out.

Consider the implications of an entire civilization founded on the principle of ideals as absolute. It tends to make people even more hard headed than they naturally are.

Good and bad are not some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience. When good is viewed as ultimate, rather than elemental, all the higher order nuance, subjectivity and complexity is lost in the race to the bottom of simple black and white contrasts.

I'll shut up now.