Don’t we form our view of the world and react to it as a constant process of trial and error? Otherwise it would seem to be a top down, essentially monotheistic creation. A perfect world, from a blank slate.

So my argument is that occasionally we reach points where we have to step back and ask if there are some errors/assumptions we might want to improve.

Since much of this reality seems to be cycles and dichotomies, such as between the organic expansion of liberalism, versus the civil and cultural consolidation of conservatism, or even the focus of specialization, versus the wide angle of generalization, then we fluctuate between these polarities and occasionally have to go back a bit the other way.

The technical advances defining our world today are the consequence of those focused on specific problems, but we still seem to have a very crude understanding of the larger reality. The potential polymaths are the ones diagnosed as attention deficient, when they are children and medicated to focus on the particular educational boxes into which our school system segregates areas of knowledge. Rather than absorbing as much as possible, then gradually seeing and learning how all these aspects of reality are necessarily connected.

Having personally grown up on a farm and actively avoided school, while reading habitually, I tend to have an outsiders view of the process.