It's not about understanding. The understanding part is a red herring.

It's about lack of agency. Because most people have very little actual freedom, and many have to deal with constant stressors, some of which are existential.

In the US freedom is defined as "the ability to earn money and buy things to consume." The advanced level is "the ability to play status games around money and ownership."

Neither of those are real freedom.

Absolute freedom means being able to do whatever you can imagine.

If your imagination is so constrained that goal collapses to "Make more money", a multibillionaire oligarch barely has more freedom than the peasants.

The West - for all of its flaws - used to be able to imagine a better future, and attempt to steer towards it.

At some point - I think it was around 9/11 - we lost that. The future stopped being an enticing place of possibility and started becoming a frightening place of threats and general diminishment.

Now we're in a churn phase where the old Cult of Tech is still running, and still has followers, but it's become increasingly clear that faith was never enough, and we're not going anywhere unless we develop true collective intelligence.

AI is a kind of attempted simulacrum of that, but it's a poor substitute for the real thing.