We all have to have a means of transmuting pain into something positive. Work that is “meaningless” is unenjoyable. Work that is “meaningful” is rewarding.
We need some sense of place or direction. This is in part a function of meaning, but we also need a means of navigating our physical world. Historically, truth has been passed down parent to child, in terms of how to eke out a living, what to believe, how the world is structured, what their role is, etc.
You have to have a system for dealing with disagreement, such that they are not resolved through violence. As libertarians like to point out, quite often the solution winds up being on-going structural violence, but some system of rules needs to be in place and someone needs to enforce them. In an optimal society, the rules are internalized and enforced with wisdom and diligence by each individual.
You have to have a means of feeding, housing, and clothing yourself. Obviously, economic systems can range from autarkic subsistence to our current, highly complex system in which buyers, sellers, and manufacturers can each be on different continents.
The point I want to make here is that culture is a means for the creation and DISTRIBUTION of meaning, truth, power and wealth, and that in a free system the higher the quality of each, the greater the distribution.
As an example, Leftism is a cultural artifact of the 19th century, when it seemed likely that everything boiled down to atoms, and that life was meaningless. As a reaction to this belief, it denigrated the previously assumed capacity for individual human moral thought and action in favor of a new oligarchic system based on the lie that the architects of such systems intended for themselves anything but on-going and complete power.
As a meaning system, it works for a certain number of people, but only those who are implementing and pushing the policies, not the people on whose behalf they are supposedly working.
As an example, Nancy Pelosi, although quite willing to cash the checks that come to her as a result of the power she has gained as a result of her politics, can also be assumed to have a certain sincerity in her belief that what she does helps the world rather than hurting it. It provides a meaning and structure to her life.
But if one were to go to Hunter’s Point, in San Francisco, or East Palo Alto, what one would find would be masses not just of economic poverty, but of moral poverty, of meaning poverty. Her meaning system has not been distributed, because it is based upon lies.
In an information-controlled country, which is much of America (since the complicit media have a large audience and are in a position both to kill stories they don’t like, and to spin the ones they can’t ignore), truth is not distributed. It is hoarded by a small elite.
Power is hoarded with socialists. Wealth is hoarded by socialists.
Hell, my brain is tired, for a variety of reasons. I had not intended this as another attack on the most pervasive evil in our world. The point was the distribution. Do with these thoughts what you will.