To lay out the problem;

Consider driving down the road and someone coming the other way swerves into your lane. While you quickly steer out of the way and back into your lane, your stress function has cranked a few notches higher, the frustration switch is cursing people texting and driving, the guilt bucket is pointing out you were doing the same thing ten minutes ago, the rationalization feedback is arguing you are a much better driver, since you didn't swerve and the sckepticism in the back is saying this whole texting thing is just speculation. Meanwhile whatever you were daydreaming about is completely forgotten. Is it any wonder your body doesn't count on the socially obsessed, hallucinating bit of mush at the top of the brain stem to make the important decisions?

So as you are asking, does this apply to our social situation?

Are there people out there who do not have to constantly reset their imaginations to outside factors, but can just keep spiraling into their own conceptual rabbit holes? Physical theorists and military strategists come to mind.

Do we really exist in a multiworlds/multiverse, or are there axioms built so far into the collective subconscious, that questioning them is completely beyond the pale of responsible conjecture? In the prior post, I pointed out that time is more effectively explained as an effect and measure of action, similar to temperature, pressure, color, sound, etc, than as a geometric dimension, but raise that point in certain company and it is beneath consideration.

Similerly there are those who spend their lives strategizing out any and every possible threat or challenge to their particular nation, in groups of people with the same focus and balanced by similar people in other countries. Then insist all these strategies and weapons systems have to be funded, for the security of the country, totally oblivious to the fact the country in question might be drowning in debt and pushing ever more of its citizens into the collective waste basket. Which is the real danger?

So the situation is mollified by said country issuing ever more promises, threats, tokens, vouchers, bonds, iou's, etc, though they mostly flow to those using them as chips in some global casino.

It doesn't look pretty. In what way will the outside reality intrude? Will it even shake these people to their senses, or are they already too hypnotized to do much more than run around and point fingers at whomever their news gurus tell them is the enemy?

It is safe to say we are now in the middle of that inferno and any clarity will have to wait until the smoke clears.

Though I would say that when the powers that be are intent on burning down a corrupt system, it's probably wise to let them finish and hope they get sufficiently burned as well.

Don't know if that's the answer, but it's my version of the truth.

People prefer answers over truths, but that's why there are so many priests and politicians, while the philosophers are generally neutered and confined to the back alleys of academia, many settling on stoicism, as the philosophical equivelant of Xanax.

We live in interesting times.