Nice post :-) I can agree with a lot, in principle. However, I would like to ask you how you feel about the reality or unreality of the climate crisis, and how we should act or not act upon it. You state, correctly, that it's useless to, as an individual, try to grasp the world; that's just impossible. But that's why we've developed institutions of education, research, science and so on. That means that collectively we are able to understand the world, and indeed the universe to a rather significant degree. Same goes for the questions posed about freedom. I hold the view that individual freedom is an illusion; all individuals only have as much freedom as the society of people they are part of grants them; this starts at home when growing up under the rules set by your parents. I say that if you "need at least a bit of culture in my life", as we all do, the amount of culture you get is always dependent upon the society that provides that culture. Now we can always take examples to their extremes, which is effective and good to make a principled point, but I do have to place question marks on your use of an immediate calamity, like the tsunami, in comparison to a slowly developing one, like an infectuous disease; that's why I asked your opinion on the climate crisis. Our evolution has blessed us with a set of cognitive biases that ensured our initial survival, but make it difficult to deal with long-term or distant threats. That results in us overestimating simple, but not very likely to occur, like terrorism, but underestimate more complex threats like climate change and covid-19. And about the laws; laws are for a large part codified morality, and codified mores for the remainder, all for the purpose of providing what we call "civil order" to society. I dream about a world where all these unwritten rules can remain just that: unwritten. But since we're a long way removed from communism, that's just unrealistic and will never happen in my lifetime. I understand anyone who is uncomfortable with or even hostile towards the rules and regulations descending down upon us from up-high, especially when these rules and regulations are created in response to a calamity or threat of a calamity; I've raged against all the freedoms we lost as a consequence of anti-terrorism laws after the 9/11 attacks. And I regularly rage against the elite who live by the rule to "never let a good crisis go to waste." I understand. But I also understand that we all stop at a red light. We all got vaccinated as kids. Some rules are simply there to keep intact a functional society (although there's much room to debate the functioning or disfunctioning of modern society).
Okay, I'll stop ranting now :-) I really do like the post and would like to thank you for directing me here.