If you want to really understand the patterns, yes, you have to first comprehend the processes generating them, but the real question then becomes, how many layers do you have to peel back, to really get to the roots?
Or do you get to the complete abstract of seeing the layers as simply waves on a longer time scale, rising and falling eternally?
I think humanity is reaching the point where we can no longer just add more patches to the problems as they arise, like some geocentric cosmology, but need to really step back.
Consider: Galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.
As a biological organism, you have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving you on, as the central nervous system sorts and orders the structures through which you have to navigate. Motor and steering. The anarchies of desire, versus the tyrannies of judgement.
Similarly society evolves the executive and regulatory function of government to referee the desires and directions of the community, as a form of collective central nervous system. As well as the mechanisms of money and banking to regulate the flows of value around the community, analogous to blood and the circulation system.
Since both arise from individual initiatives, they develop as forms of private enterprise.
Yet we eventually came to understand that government only really works over the long term as a form of public utility, but still view banking as being part of the private sector.
Which has given banking power over government, as politicians are limited in their powers by election cycles.
The consequence of which is that the resulting cultural model of capitalism has all the strategic aptitude of bacteria racing across a petri dish, given desire has trumped judgement. The banks are having their, "Let them eat cake." moment.
Money functions as a contract, where the asset is necessarily backed by an obligation, enabling the accounting of value flows around the economy, yet we have come to see it as a commodity to mine from the economy. Econ 101 says it is both medium of exchange and store of value, but one is dynamic, while the other is static. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store.
As a medium, we own money like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water flowing through our bodies. It's not our picture on it, we don't hold the copyrights and are not responsible for its value, like a personal check.
The problem is that we are linear, goal oriented creatures in a cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality. Give and take, not all take.
To store the asset, similar amounts of debt have to be generated. Besides our entire economy becoming an enormous bubble of debt based assets depending on entities that borrow to buy what they could not otherwise afford, it should be noted the capital markets could not function without government becoming debtor of last resort. Those trillions of government bonds are the bedrock of the system.
That this money often gets spent blowing up third world countries and is therefore not productively spent, doesn't seem to be taken into account, for the long term.
As with the strategic aptitude of bacteria, basically the military industrial complex is like the trophy wife of the banks. She gets all the toys she wants and no one can point out she is too dumb to actually win any wars. If this was about actual national defence, various of those responsible would have been taken out and shot, not given cushy jobs promoting more wars.
As for conservative versus liberal, it's all cycles of expansion and consolidation. The irony is the current woke movement is the consolidation of various liberal ideas of fifty years ago. They are the modern conservatives and the traditional conservatives are like royalists of a hundred years ago. What you need to look for is to what's actually growing in the cracks, that hasn't solidified into any thing distinct yet.
Layers upon layers, like growth rings of a tree.
