The broader the context, the more elemental the denominators required to make sense of it.
When society is millions and billions of people, it isn't so much culture, politics, or morality, as it is biology and physics.
The two most basic dynamics are synchronization, which is centripetal and harmonization, which is centrifugal. The effect is nodes and networks, organisms and ecosystems.
Information tends to be centripetal, while energy tends to be centrifugal. Our nervous system processes information, while the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems process energy.
In society, this is reflective of government, as the executive and regulatory function, while money and banking are analogous to blood and the circulation system.
So there will always be this inherent tension between the elements seeking to order and organize society, versus those driving it. Motor and steering.
The anarchies of desire, versus the tyrannies of judgement.
The problem for the modern western world, exemplified by the United States, is that after a few centuries of geographic, population, economic and technological growth, the dominant social contract remaining is the currency. While we have come to view it as a commodity to mine from society, in reality it is the social contract enabling it.
As a contract, the asset is backed by the debt, so our society is geared toward generating debt, in order to create the illusion of wealth. Wars and welfare don't create a functional society, but they do create debt.
The problem is that a medium is not a store. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store. One is dynamic, while the other is static. Mix them up and the system breaks down.
The functionality of money is its fungibility. As a medium, we own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water flowing through our bodies. As such, it is a public utility, like roads. It's not our picture on it, we don't hold the copyrights and are not individually responsible for its value, as though it were a personal check.
The fact is that there isn't the investment potential to save what we need, but we do save for many of the same reasons, so the concept of the commons will eventually have to be resurrected and updated.
The problem this presents to our current world is that our very lives are adapted to this atomized focus on the individual. A tree farm, not a forest. The irony is that instead of freeing us, it makes us more easily controlled by institutional forces and mediated by a parasitic financial system.
The reality is this system is imploding, as it contracts to serving an ever more focused elite, who will destroy their own system, as they fight among themselves.
Government was originally private and now banking is having it, "Let them eat cake." moment.
It is like a scab, slowing separating from the underlaying organism. Or a tumor, feeding off it.
Then the question will be whether we rise above it, acknowledging the fluctuating harmonics and synchrocities, or sink back into a dystopian feudalism.
