To culture, good and bad are some cosmic conflict between righteousness and evil, while in nature, it's the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The1/0 of sentience.

That's because it is the function of culture to synchronize everyone into a larger social organism.

Yet while synchronization is centripetal, harmonization is centrifugal, so organisms exist in the larger ecosystems.

It's not like any of us can stop this spiraling into the abyss, of whatever totem is at the center, whether god or Mammon.

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

Ideals are not absolute and an entire culture founded on the principle is fractious, as all the competing ideals clash.

That our current reductionist obsession with the medium of money as the message is tearing apart the society on which it is based, is part of the learning process. It is like a scab that is slowly drying up and will peel away.

Presumably the next cycle will come to understand a medium is not a store. Blood is a medium, fat is a store.

A healthy society is based on collective responsibility, with rights as reward, but ours views rights as whatever we can grab and responsibility as punishment, when things go wrong. The result is the tragedy of the commons.