We like to come up with explanations for the way things are, but after awhile it becomes apparent the patches are just patches and we need to just step back a bit and look at the whole cultural edifice.

For one thing, a spiritual absolute would not be some ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell, but the essence of sentience, from which we rise, that bubbles up through life, driving us on. More the light shining through the film, than the images and story lines presented on it. The fact of our desire, more so than the objects of our desire.

That philosophy conflates the ideal with the absolute is a much deeper and darker issue, as well. Since much of society has lost faith in the all-knowing deity, this confusing the ideal with the absolute has been transferred to the notion of materialism, where the tool that enables mass society to function, the contract that is money, has been turned into the God that rules society.

Markets require money to circulate, while people see it as the signal to extract from the noise of society and the economy. Requiring ever more to be added and ever more inventive ways to store what has been extracted. Creating an all too real financial bubble of enormous size.

Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store. The average 5 year old senses the difference, but economists lack that level of insight.

We own money like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water passing through our bodies.

Which goes to the notion of meaning. We treat it as some signal to extract from the noise of the larger reality, yet any meaning is integral to that larger noise and when extracted, it becomes dead. It is a feedback loop between the node and the network. Trees and the forest. Individuals and society.

Positive feedback and negative feedback are two sides of the same dynamic. Without the ups and downs, it’s a flatline.

Which goes to the issue of good and bad. Our culture assumes them to be some ultimate conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, but they are really the biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of life. Even bacteria sense that attraction/repulsion.

All the higher order social and human impulses, such as love, honor, respect, responsibility, trust, as well as the negatives, are complex permutations, evolved upward from this basis, like a computer program emerges from one and zero.

So when we treat this dichotomy as ultimate, rather than elemental, conflicts quickly become a race to the bottom, of us versus them, good versus bad, black versus white. Rather than each side being able to assume the other will hold to the higher evolved structures of culture and civilization. Potentially using such issues as opportunities to further develop, evolve and grow.

The real tension is between our desires and the need to sort among them. The heart and the head. The anarchy of desire versus the tyranny of judgement.

The irony of the situation is that while our cultural beliefs should be the one thing we could change, when the situation becomes dire, they end up becoming what we cling to most tightly, as they are the assumptions which we all can agree. So it takes an even greater crisis to really break society down, before it can change. The old bird doesn’t go back in its egg, we need a new egg.

So suffering has its uses. It’s called “trial and error.” When the pain becomes serious enough and we can no longer grin and bear it, we really start asking questions.

The desire is greater than any ideal, because the desire creates the ideal, not the other way around.