What if the problems go to the foundations of the Western paradigm and we are just reaching the point of reductio ad absurdum?

Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. Ancient Israel was a monarchy. Rome adopted a monotheistic sect as state religion, as the Empire was rising from the ashes of the Republic. Basically validating The Big Guy Rules.

While many claim to be atheist, the concepts arising from this omniscient omniscience are still there. That some objective rationality is a default state, rather than knowledge is a function of the framing, mapping, modeling, points of view, etc. Excess information produces whiteout. Too much noise and the signal is drowned out.

The universal is the elemental, so 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 and animating the film, than the stories playing out on it.

Ideals are not absolutes. Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The core principles, codes, creeds, heroes, narratives that are the gravitational center of every culture and society are ideals, but obviously not universal.

Without the core, society breaks apart. Tower of Babel.

Morality is not an absolute, because it could not be transgressed, if it were. Like a temperature below absolute zero.

Morality is an ideal. Specifically the codes that enable a functional society. From theTen Commandments, to the US Constitution.

While our cultures might conceive of good and bad as some cosmic conflict, between the forces of righteousness and evil, in nature, it is the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience. So while culture is the stories we tell children to get them to behave, nature is some enormous computational process, that doesn't always come up with the answers we want to hear.

While we might view rights as the highest goal, a functional society is far more dependent on collective responsibility, with rights as reward. It is just that when our codes were first being conceived, this was taken for granted, so the debates were over rights.

The problem with making an Almighty God the moral policeman, was that as fear of God died, it was only the Will to Power that rose to fill the void. Might is right.

As it is now, the core of Western culture is the medium of exchange, the money. The medium has become the message.

While we might think of money as signal to save and store, markets need it to circulate, so Econ 101 considers it both medium of exchange and store of value.

Blood is a medium, fat, as well as bone and muscle, are stores. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store. The average five year old can understand the difference.

To store the asset side of the ledger, a debt has to back it. So we have the entire society dissolving into this economic Ebola virus of debt, to maintain the illusion of monetary wealth.

The Ancients devised debt jubilees, 3000 years ago, as circuit breakers to the feedback loop of compound interest, yet here we are are, stuck in the same sort doom loop, just exponentially more complex.

I could go on, but this is getting too long. The point is the problems go to the foundations and it's mostly been patches on patches ever since.

I've been shadow banned on Substack, since two day after posting;

https://johnbrodixmerrymanjr.medium.com/gods-problems-cdab66ed5f04

So some of these points are not exactly popular, but eventually they should be explored.