Developing a Comprehensive Perspective
It Is Not Easy to Achieve, But I Am Trying to Make It Easier
I was a budding polymath from the time I could walk. I was fascinated by everything, especially nature. I am a learning junkie, and became a seat-of-the-britches comprehensivist before I had ever heard of the term. One of Bucky Fuller’s pupils called me that, and I didn’t know what he meant. He had me read a couple of Fuller’s books, the lightbulb finally went on, and my work has been consciously comprehensive ever since.
From as early as I can remember, I wanted to know the truth. I was a Boy Scout, literally. During my journey, when I found anybody like me, they were also overgrown Boy Scouts who pursued the truth, in whatever endeavor they were in. They were Brian O’Leary’s Truth Seekers. I played all four roles of Brian’s Four Cultures of the Phoenix in my lifetime.
The vast majority of humanity is fed the in-group propagandas of their particular societies, they never learn any differently, and they don’t want to. It took me a long time to understand that. I have seen mystical reasons that seem to explain it, and when I watched people choose certain death over questioning their indoctrination, those were poignant moments for me. A close friend is doing that today, who was likely given cancer by the COVID vaccine. All I can do is stand back, watch, and help ease his journey into the afterlife.
I was a scientist-in-training until a desperate prayer led me into studying business, but I never gave up my teenage dream of changing the energy industry. Be careful what you wish for. The only reasons why I survived my odyssey with Dennis Lee were my youth and idealism, which had a pretty deep spiritual foundation by that time. I could tell that my cognitive dissonance had been building since college, intensified early in my career, when I asked the question that nobody wanted to hear, and I tried to broaden my outlook. But all of that was only a gentle prelude to becoming Indiana Jones’s sidekick, after another desperate prayer was answered.
When I moved away from my home town in 1990, with my life in ruins, I began studying everything in my radicalized state. In retrospect, I was becoming a comprehensivist, but I was just trying to understand why my experiences of how the world worked were so contrary to what I had been taught. I was the classic disillusioned idealist. As I discovered truths hidden from me while growing up, and the outright lies that I was often taught as truth, I soon learned that almost nobody around me wanted to hear about it. The belief toolset that they were given while growing up was good enough for them to survive and temporarily sate their addictions, and they did not want to hear anything else. Those were sobering moments for me.
I discovered that it didn’t matter what the subject was, what the nation, industry, or profession was: virtually everybody abdicated their sentience to become a valued member of their in-group, as that was how they survived. I also encountered the ideological foot-soldiers who protected the body of lies, such as the “skeptics,” who mostly believe in their mission, just like their professional ancestors the Dominican inquisitors did. I found that people can justify anything, believe anything, no matter what crimes they commit or abet, no matter what the evidence is. Such people were not pursuing the truth, but their self-interest, which often meant defending the ideologies that fed them, their in-groups, etc.
My previous post was about how the left and right have lopsided perspectives, with their overreliance on structuralism and conspiracism. Each of them is not enough, by itself, to understand how our world works. One tribe seizes on the tail, the other the trunk, but both are a long way from comprehending the entire elephant. We all see dimly through the glass in physical reality, but only by aspiring to comprehensive perspectives can people begin to understand how our world really works. It is not easy and has devoured my lifetime, but my work is intended to reduce the intellectual lift needed to think comprehensively. Maybe that is folly, too, but I had to try.