To make it much simpler, we need a cyclical, reciprocal paradigm, rather than this linear goal oriented one.

For the last hundred thousand years, we’ve been going forth and multiplying, but now we are reaching the edge of the global petri dish.

As mobile, intentional organisms, we experience reality as flashes of perception, then narrate our journeys and build civilizations out of the collected knowledge. Given those stories with the most memorable narrative arc and clear conclusion are the most repeated, we naturally think of reality as having some goal or pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Yet nature is more about cycles and feedback. The ups are balanced by the downs, or it would just be a flatline.

We assume time is the point of the present, moving past to future, but it is change turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Potential, actual, residual.

While we only live in the present, we don’t necessarily have to live for it, as it is our ability to escape it that rises us above other life. Yet we should try to understand it.

Time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. What truly dominates our reality is not so much the cause and effect linearity of time, but the thermodynamic feedback loops cycling everything together. Galaxies are energy radiating out, as mass coalesces in, in cosmic convection cycles.

Our bodies have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, along with the central nervous system to sort through the forms precipitating out and referee the emotions and impulses bubbling up.

Societies are the tension between the multitudes of desires pushing out, versus the civil and cultural forms coalescing in.

As energy is conserved and thus always and only present, it is constantly changing form. So while the energy goes past to future forms, the forms go future to past. Consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts and feelings go future to past.

Lives go birth to death, while life goes onto the next generation, shedding the old.

In factories, the product goes start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.

The feedback is that the patterns steer the process.

In our current mass society, we think of ourselves as more individuals, than communities, but this creates an atomized culture, which is then conveniently ruled by top down political systems, as well as mediated by extractionist financial systems. We are not governed by the wisest, but ruled by the loudest and we only trust in the dollar.

The 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. The light shining through the film, than the images on it.

Yet in our search for the ideal, we assign it to the absolute, but that only encourages cultural narcissism, as we assume our particular social mores to be universal, rather than unique.

Good and bad are not a cosmic dual between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. So moral codes are never set in stone, but a constant tension and fluctuation between desire and judgement. Between anarchy and tyranny.

Money is a medium, like blood, but we try to save and store it, like fat. As a medium it functions as a contract, with one side an asset and the other a debt, so in order to store the asset, similar amounts of debt have to be created.

Which causes a centripetal effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center of society, while negative feedback draws the debt to the edges.

Even if this surplus wealth is drained off by corruption, it still has to be spent back into the system, in some way or another. Either productively, or wastefully. Our current economic model can only cheat on the foundations, in order to store more gold in the penthouse for so long, before it does more than just trickle down. The greatest danger to capitalism are the capitalists.

We need to understand this dynamic and how to store value in stronger communities and healthier environments, not simply siphon notational value out to store in bank accounts.

It’s not so much a grand vision for the future we need, but to go back and sort through all the cultural cobwebs that have brought us to this point.