We are these linear, goal oriented creatures, in a cyclical, reciprocal, feedback driven reality. What you are observing is a dichotomy, between the focus and clarity we get from rationalization, but then we lose sight of the bigger picture. How do we make sense of that larger reality, that currently is erupting in an enormous amount of blowback from our instistance on ends over means?
For one thing, good and bad are not some cosmic duel between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken. The 1/0 of life. Social and emotional effects evolve upward from this polarity, so when it is taken as aspiration, rather then elemental, conflicts become a race to the bottom, of us versus them, good versus bad and any middle ground is only to be fought over. Rather than each side being able to assume the other might hold to some higher order emotional and social constructs, such as respect, responsibility, trust, love, honor, etc.
The Western paradigm still assumes this monolithic idealism, as the ultimate. The reality though is more a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, as what is best in one context might not be in another. As these mobile organisms, our experience of reality is a sequence of perceptions, that we constantly are judging, as a fundamental function of navigation. So when we project out this process of deciding, there emerges the assumption that if there is a sequence of ever better options, there most be some ideal state of perfection. Originally this developed as the notion of deities, as expressions of the ideal and ultimately, monotheism, as the ideal ideal.
Though the conclusion of such a spiritual absolute is a misconception, as a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell.
More the light shining through the film, than the images and storyline on it.
Though the anthropomorphic deity has faded from importance, the shadow of God, the logical fallacy of assuming the ideal as absolute remains. It has just been transferred to other forms, from the bottom line of economic reductionist materialism, to any number of other cultural touchstones.
If the fault lays with any field, it is not so much the religious, or political formulations, as they are mostly sociological functions, but with philosophy, for allowing the ideal to be construed as absolute. If this logical fallacy had been studied and examined for a few hundred years, it would have undermined the formulation of the various ideologies that have bedeviled humanity.
If we had more of a yin/yang paradigm, than this endless search for the perfect, it would have provided much less fertile ground for absolutist nationalist, economic systems and other tyrannies.
Nodes need their networks and vice versa. Cycles of expansion and consolidation. Youth and age, liberal and conservative.
Unfortunately people mostly want answers to their questions, not any larger truths, so we have plenty of politicians and priests, but philosophy has been neutered and confined to the back alleys of academia. Seriously beating the same, age old questions to death and beyond.
