This is absolutely true. Why, I myself am a member of no less than 8 conspiracies that I know of. Of course, I can't tell you any further details; that would defeat the point of a conspiracy after all.

The problem is that I keep forgetting the secret handshakes. One of these days, I'm going to leave my thumb out rather than in and someone's going to shank me with a shiv. Or shiv me with a shank; I can't remember how that goes either.

It's both historical & journalistic. Capitalism, corporatism, empire, patriarchy, globalism public choice, regulatory capture... these do all relate to reality, but they are not reality themselves. They are abstractions. A potentially useful way of seeing a broad picture, but also hazardous.

Spending too many brain cycles in these abstractions makes us formulaic. We no longer see unique & specific examples, just uninteresting specific examples of a greater truth.

We all do it. It's inevitable. It's how we think, especially politically. But, it is worth consiously avoiding, in my opinion.

your point seems to be directed at how human discussions happen generally and how we must necessarily abstract away details to even have those discussions at all.

but we sometimes collectively need to grind through the ruts a number of times before finding a good solution, especially if the solution involves a variable abstracted away by the model.

so why specifically does your noted pitfall need to be avoided? and what alternatives can you offer?

but more to the point, what's the model of car-centric cities you'd advocate?

yeah, it's like np problems. Nobody needs to talk about the travellingn salesman, and it's harmful to even say it's an no problem, since we already have SAT solvers, and that's all we need to understand that np problems are hard to solve.