Something I’ve noticed studying systems theory is that liberalism is basically antithetical to systems thinking. The moment you apply a genuine systemic lens to individual choices at-scale, the whole thing falls apart fairly quickly. You pretty much have to assume that there’s some kind of plan orchestrated by groups of individual actors, or else you have to accept that things don’t happen because of the choices that people make, and if the choices people make aren’t that relevant, then changing people’s minds through education, debate, media, etc. doesn’t actually matter that much. The status quo doesn’t persist because of people’s choices, the status quo is driven by those choices. Individual agency is already priced-in, so to speak, at both the low and high level. Even individuals in places of power are basically train conductors. They don’t actually make any decisions about the direction they’re going, they just run the train.

It’s hard to get your head around at first, but once you start seeing that powerful people’s decisions are a result of systemic forces, rather than the cause, a lot of stuff starts to make sense.