What if none of this works? How far are you willing to go, to understanding how society functions, before prescribing a cure?
We have an ideals based culture, assuming there is some higher state toward which we are destined, but nature seems to continue to insist on being cyclical and reciprocal, no matter how much we ignore it. Without the ups and owns, it would be a flatline.
The problem with this absolutist idealism, is that when the higher codes break down, we seek the ideal in other desires; fame, fortune, happiness and any number of other wants.
To the Ancients, there was no distinction between religion and politics, as monotheism equated with despotism, as in one god, one ruler. While democracy and republicanism were informed by and formed around pan and polytheistic societies. As in many gods, many voices/power centers.
Necessitating the separation of church and state, when politics outgrew the divine right of kings and settled back into democratic forms.
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. More the new born, than the wise old man. Consciousness seeking knowledge, than any form of it. The light shining through the film, than the images on it.
Good and bad are not a cosmic dual 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. Ethical systems evolve upward and when they settle into stable forms, develop cracks, as it is a constantly dynamic process.
It is just that in order to function as a coherent structure, a society needs a stable moral structure and framework. So this father figure lawgiver and his ten commandments is a useful device for passing that form onto future generations. Basically stories for children.
Reality, on the other hand, is a dichotomy of energy and the forms it manifests. Galaxies are energy radiating out, as mass/structure gravitates in.
People have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, along with a central nervous system to process and sort the forms and patterns emerging. Basically a referee to select useful signals from the noise.
Society is that tension and balance between raw social energies bubbling up and the cultural and civil forms coalescing in. Aka, liberal desires and conservative order.
Neither of which can exist, without the other, so it is a constant fluctuation between those energies pushing the boundaries and the structures giving the most effective direction and stability, by promoting some desires, over others. Motor and steering. Too much energy and it’s anarchy. Too much order and it’s totalitarianism.
Right now, after a few tens of thousands of years of going forth and multiplying, we are reaching the edge of the global petri dish and it’s time to take stock.
We are going to have to eventually understand that we can’t have everything, no matter how much we idolize it. The price we pay to feel is that much of it will be pain. We need to accept that we are part of a cycle and the end is just punctuation, not destination.
Time is not so much the point of the present, moving past to future, as it is change turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. We have what we have and we are what we are. Deal with it.
