I tend to be a bottom up thinker, spending a seemingly inordinate amount of time mucking about in minutia, and then attempting to fit an abstraction to the data. It works for me. Eventually.

On the other hand, the world is vastly more complicated than it was during the Renaissance. It demands that we accept the generalizations of others just to be able to function.

We do so out of need, but we also do so at some peril. Giving inadequately formed generalizations too much intellectual power guarantees that sooner or later the trolley is going to run off the track. The generalizations become ideologies and we follow them as if they were God given. That should be the yellow flag of warning.

Socialism and capitalism are offered as competing ideologies. America embraced unfettered capitalism and deprecated creeping socialism. It looked really good for awhile. Then the trolley ran off the track.