With reference to Are we capable of understanding the system in which we live? , I once read an interesting book: The Outer Limits of Reason.
You can find it on Amazon or similar websites, here is the gist of it:
Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book
investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing
facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this
work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be
revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what
cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be
understood.
He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic,
and our own thought processes. Yanofsky describes simple tasks that
would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other
problems that computers can never solve; perfectly formed English
sentences that make no sense; different levels of infinity; the
bizarre world of the quantum; the relevance of relativity theory; the
causes of chaos theory; math problems that cannot be solved by normal
means; and statements that are true but cannot be proven. He explains
the limitations of our intuitions about the world -- our ideas about
space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the
knower and the known.
Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from
problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical
questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky
demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring
the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these
limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these
patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of
reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of
reason to see what, if anything, is out there.
