Regulators
In some sense, every living being is regulating all the others it interacts with. There are some interesting cases to think about this in, like with parents and children. Obviously parents are regulating their children because that is their job, but children are also regulating their parents in ways that are usually ineffective. A child crying because they can’t eat ice cream all the time is an attempt at regulation, but the parent is smart enough to know that is not a good idea.
It’s interesting to think about a larger collection of possibly eternal entities and how this dynamic would play out. Note that different entities can be eternal in their own way. Humans don’t exist eternally individually as of now, but they have existed for a much longer period than any individual through genetic material. Societies exist as long as they do good for others and themselves and do not get overtaken. Maybe the world is the same way.
Getting back to analyzing at the level of entities. Each one would sometimes be the parent and sometimes be the child. They would have a choice between destructive methods which bring them both down and constructive ones where they work together. This dynamic can work at multiple levels. Between people, between societies, maybe even between gods and also between those at different levels.
The goal of regulation of humans is interesting to think about too. It’s almost like we are supposed to find a saddle point for ourselves and are being helped by those around us while also making things better for everyone. Up is towards being frozen. Down is towards burning up. Making things better for everyone is like raising everyone’s saddle point.
If we don’t raise it for everyone simultaneously, they can often see the unfairness and disregulate themselves and others in positive or negative directions. Even that itself is only a mechanism of regulating the larger society. Different people have different capabilities of regulation.
Religious leaders regulate thoughts and philosophy through suggestion which makes society more healthy. Technology leaders regulate our tools whose method of use is determined by the health of society and individuals. Economic leaders regulate the creation and allocation of money. Government leaders regulate the direction and morale of societies.
Sometimes leaders of one type get power hungry and try to take on others’ responsibility or take too much for themselves, which may be what we see with technology leaders in our society today and with the decrease in philanthropy by the richest. The problem is some people are not spending enough time to think about how everything fits together. Even the most powerful have regulators. They may be distributed and hard to see or gods above.
On the other end of the spectrum, it’s also not good to spend too much time thinking about the regulators as regulators because then you might spend too much time resisting and won’t get anything else done. It’s up to every individual to decide if they want to spend their attention pushing back on the regulators in either direction. That push back can happen naturally based on the distress coming from that direction if we are conscious of it.
The golden rule, or Jesus’ top two commandments, are to love the regulators both above and below you. That doesn’t mean always do what they say, just trust they are there for a reason and the truth of their word is likely proportional to their power in a healthy relationship. Try to work together constructively instead of destructively.