First Principles

If you don’t have the categories for something, your mind literally can’t “see” it. Not because it isn’t there—but because you don’t yet have the language, framework, or experience to register it.

I was re-watching the Matrix Trilogy this past weekend with my wife—struggling with the tension of examining the narrative; constantly comparing it with my Christian world-view, and whether I still perceive it to be compatible, or just some hippie-mumbo-jumbo-syncretistic non-sense.

And...There were several lines that hit me, one of those was when the Oracle and Neo are having a chat in the back-channel courtyard,

and she tells Neo: "We can never see past the choices we don’t understand."

I wondered for a moment, given all of this political violence — What really is going on? Are we entering a Civil War and America is falling, our Congress if failing and we have an authoritarian Right? Or is America dying to be rebirthed into a fourth empire?

Can we shape the future — but right now, it is limited by mindset, self-fulfilling prophecies and our inability to see outside of time? Is there a way to have a level of faith that bends the rules of the System?

A few straight truths:

• Perception is filtered, not neutral.
  You never see reality raw. You see it through mental models—assumptions, vocabulary, stories, prior knowledge. What doesn’t fit the model gets ignored, dismissed, or distorted.
• Ignorance isn’t just “not knowing”—it’s blindness.
  Until you understand a concept, you can’t see its implications, consequences, or alternatives. That’s why people confidently argue bad positions—they literally can’t see past the frame they’re in.
• You can’t reason beyond your operating system.
  If someone lacks the category for “propaganda,” they’ll call it news.
  If they lack the category for “deception,” they’ll call it love.
  If they lack the category for “transcendent truth,” they’ll call everything subjective.
• Understanding expands vision.
  Once you learn something, you can’t unsee it. The world reorganizes itself. Patterns emerge that were always there—but invisible.
• This is why humility matters.
  The most dangerous posture isn’t being wrong—it’s assuming you already see clearly. That locks the door to growth.

Put bluntly:
What you don’t understand doesn’t just stay unknown—it defines the boundaries of your world.