The reason we are these episodic memory machines is that we are mobile organisms. In order to sense and navigate our environment, we have this sequential process of perception, that we are constantly sorting and judging, in order to chose our direction. Then as humanity, we have a narrative based culture, as we build knowledge out of sharing our journeys.

Which creates several biases. Primarily of which is viewing time as the point of the present, moving past to future. 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, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

So time is an effect of the underlaying activity, like temperature, pressure, color, sound. Think frequencies and amplitudes.

Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don't refer to them as the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thought.

Another bias is that as our culture is narrative based and the most compelling narratives are the most repeated, we assume the purpose of life is the punch line, the pot of gold at the end of the narrative arc. So life becomes about the ends, the goals, than the means, the here and now. Be it heaven, or the bottom line.

Then since groups of people need some institutional, organizational, cultural, civil framework to function as one, it becomes imperative they follow the same narrative, dance to the same tunes, seek the same goals, use the same language and measures. Which makes them a node in the larger network, organism in the ecosystem, as individuals are nodes in the ecosystem of society.

Over time we have evolved upward and outward, as ever larger and more diverse communities, but the centralizing imperative remained, so the control mechanisms became ever more evolved and ideological. When tribal cultures gave way to city states and their confederations, culture went from primal superstitions to the original multiculturalism of pantheism, which provided the basis for popular forms of government, ie, democracy and republicanism. Though these proved inadequate for imperial empires and so monotheism became the original global, totalitarian form of culture and thus civics. Eventually the "divine right of kings" also proved inadequate to address social functions and civics went back to democracy and republicanism, but this required the separation of church and state, culture and civics.

The basic fallacy of monotheism is 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. While it provides an effective cultural tool to legitimize top down authority, conflating the ideal with the absolute is philosophically preposterous and generally serves to validate the various forms of extremism. As these movements can assume their ends deserve any means of acquistion.

While direct political control has proven ineffective for large and diverse societies, the financial circulation system remains the primary tool to both control and loot society.

Capitalism is not synonymous with a market based economy, as markets need money to circulate, while Capitalism assumes its creation as the end in itself.

Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, but a medium is fluid, while a store is static. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store.

As we treat it as the signal to extract and store, from the noise of society and the conomy, ever more has to be added and ever more metastatic and unstable methods have to be devised to store what has been extracted.

As most money is a contract, with the asset backed by a debt, rather than the commodity is is assumed to be, that means sufficient debt has to be generated to store those mountians of wealth the economy is presumed to generate.

One way is through austerity for the general economy, as this causes it to run on debt, drawing that saved money back into circulation.

The other primary method is having the government as debtor of last resort. The capital markets simply could not function, without the government siphoning up trillions in apparently surplus money. Where would it go otherwise? Derivatives? Apple stock? Ferraris?

Which might explain why we can have endless, strategically inept wars and no one is held to account and court marshalled, just given jobs as media experts, if the real purpose is to spend the money, in order that more can be borrowed.

The secret sauce of capitalism is that public debt backs private wealth.

We could find ways to invest in a public commons, but that would go against private power as the current absolutist ideology.

So, yes, much of our culture really is bullshit, but while everyone knows this, the reasons and details are effectively obscured.

Though it's all starting to look like the Soviet Union, circa 1989.