The problem with setting out the good as the goal is that, contrary to religious belief, good and bad are not some cosmic dual between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental, to which you allude. It is the 1/0 of sentient decision making.
The fallacy of treating this as aspiration, rather then elemental, is that all the higher order social, emotional, cultural desires and attributes, such as honor, trust, responsibility, respect, love, as well as the negatives, are complex interactions of this basic binary, like computer programs arise out of 1/0.
So when we treat good and bad as over-riding, rather than elementary, conflicts quickly become a race to the bottom of good versus bad, us versus them. Rather than each side assuming the other can be held to the evolved civilizational standards and potentially treating such conflicts as potential opportunities to further develop societal constructs and standards.
We are certainly deeply attracted to what we perceive as the good and repelled by what we perceive as the bad, but so are bacteria. Though bacteria lack ideological belief systems and can quickly adapt to changing circumstances.
This is part of a larger cultural misconception. For one thing, a spiritual absolute would necessarily be the essence of sentience, from which life rises, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which it fell. More the light shining through the film than the images and storyline on it.
No, society couldn’t function by simply reveling in sentience, so worshiping the ideal has its uses, though confusing the ideal with the absolute can be very dangerous, when taken to extremes, as it validates the most intransigent aspects of one’s culture, if its ideals are assumed to be absolute.
The much deeper problem is that we are linear, goal oriented creatures in a cyclical, reciprocal reality, so those pesky feedback loops keep coming around and hitting us from behind.
As these mobile, intentional entities, with a narrative based culture, we think of time as the point of the present, going past to future, though the reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to drive and inform it. Causality and conservation of energy.
Since culture and civilization are a consequence our ability to tell stories to one another and those stories with the most compelling narrative arc are the most repeated, the assumption is that life is about the finale. The ends, rather than the means.
Yet we are reaching the edge of our global petri dish and it is time we begin to better appreciate the circularity and reciprocity of life.
We cycle through these rhythms of expansion and consolidation, each time building our knowledge and civilization out a little further. Eventually we will come to see that as creatures on the surface of this planet, we are ultimately defined by it and the rest of life on it. It would seem that life is evolving toward a global organism, with humanity as its central nervous system. Though we are currently at an extremely adolescent and self serving stage. This self absorption will be beat out of us though. Or else.
Hopefully we are more toward the end of the beginning, than the beginning of the end.
