Unfortunately, our linear, goal oriented culture doesn’t recognize the essential nature of feedback loops. Witness our growth obsessed society, in a finite world. While nature is starting off giving us relatively gentle reminders, we will reach the edge of the petri dish, on our current trajectory.
So how can the fact of nature’s cycles and reciprocity be put front and center?
I’ve come across three main themes. Which I’ve tried to encapsulate here;
Basically, time, God and money.
We look at time backwards. As mobile organisms, we experience our reality as sequences of perception and build civilizations out of the narrative based knowledge, so we think of time as the point of the present moving past to future, but the evident fact is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. As such, time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. So our linear experience, as all-encompassing as it might seem, is still contained within this thermodynamic present, with its cycles of expansion and consolidation.
The logical 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. Which cycles up through degrees of complexity and the occasional reset.
Money is the medium which enables mass society to function, but we treat it as a commodity to mine from society. The signal we extract from the noise of the economy. The problem is that a medium doesn’t store well. Blood is a medium, while fat is a store. Consequently our metastatic financial system has grown orders of magnitude larger than the society it is supposed to serve.
Though trying to make these points to any of the communities invested in them is a futile endeavor. Once I made the above theological point to a Catholic priest and he crossed himself and walked away.
I guess we have to learn the lessons the hard way.
