This Is Not A Conspiracy Theory

Like gravity drives the clockwork of the solar system, like the pendulum drives the machinery of the clock, the social scientists of the Enlightenment imagined that the hidden force driving the clockwork of human affairs had to be the intentions of individuals. But stripped of mathematics and experimentation, the method that had worked so well for the rest of the natural world failed when applied to society. People proved vastly more complex than planets.

After our time with the Founding Fathers in episodes two and three we fast-forward to post-war America. We see how the scientific ideas of the enlightenment shape our understanding of the tumultuous decades to follow.

We make sense of the world using ideas we’ve copied and inherited. These ideas lead us to believe that the future can be predicted. But no one can predict the future. And this can be demonstrated using a simple game invented many decades ago.

Each of us is a node in countless networks of incomprehensible complexity. But we can begin to understand these systems through the simple systems we create in our daily lives. And when we begin to understand systems, we begin to truly understand reality.