Is it possible for people to fully comprehend everything around them, or are they simply deceiving themselves by attempting to explain everything with their limited understanding?

Big question. What does even ”everything around them” mean? Their closest, physical, everyday surroundings - or the world, as presented to them by means of whatever media?

I’d say that the alternative closest to the truth, as a whole, is the second one: ”simply deceiving themselves by attempting to explain everything with their limited understanding”. We all comprehend what we are able to perceive and, above all, what we want to believe. It’s plain to see. We don’t know everything. We have a limited amount of knowledge and possibly some kind of principles. We can hopefully experience things, learn, read, listen, think etc, but we will always only get so far. We are victims of propaganda, lies, bias and wishful thinking. We are blinded by our own prejudice, herd mentality, fear and possibly anger. We are more or less narcissistic, placing our own tiny self in the center of our universe. Not doing so is hard and unusual. Understanding others is almost impossible. Understanding yourself is difficult enough. We spend a lifetime trying and still a lot of us fail.

We can easily come up with countless examples of this. I’ll give you just one example. It’s now November 8, 2024. You Americans voted a couple of days ago. Your former president, Trump, made a huge comeback, apparently supported and loved by a solid majority of the electorate. I feared it would happen. But most of all, like so many others, both in the US and the rest of the world, I wanted to believe that the people would say ”you’re fired” to this nightmare of a candidate instead. But no. We were wrong. Even women voted for him. Even minorities. Et cetera. Some of the people he has consistently targeted, slandered, belittled, bullied and openly despised… did actually vote for him. I am shocked and judging from the comments I see, I’m not the only one. His crimes, his lies, his threats, his awful personality, his constant bragging, meandering word-salad and hatespeech - none of it was enough for a majority to dismiss him in disgust. Something made him win. I have tried to grasp it, but it’s not easy. The truth must be that what we see here is what America is. Good luck with your Project 2025, then. Many enough of you seem to want that sort of thing to happen.

The future will be interesting. Those of us who prefer wise, progressive, empathic and caring representatives, trying to serve everybody and not just their own tribe, will not go quietly into that dark night. We will keep opposing de facto fascism. We will condemn and oppose thugs like Putin, not kiss their asses. We will keep supporting science and work for saving our planet from total climate disaster. But it seems like folks like me will have to stop believing that our sentiment is self-evident for a majority of people. The US is not the only place where this sort of development is happening. Democracy, at least the liberal, including kind, is attacked and starting to lose support. The world is changing and part of that change is hard to understand. We can just start trying. Enter reality check of the harsh kind… But while learning, we still won’t go away. You see, as far as we fully(?) comprehend, we just can’t. Giving up is not an option, but tactics and methods seem to be in need of some tweaking.