There are various ways of making sense of this strange universe. One of those ways is by making full use of the mind as a semantic compressing organ, which is partially what it was built to do to carry out various practical functions.
So you identify a given set of borders, or an organic formation, and locate it in relation to other formations in various hierarchies, and it allows you to manipulate these things or locate them in a certain schema that allows you to navigate the world.
Sometimes this breaks down however...when a given method of compression becomes incoherent or no longer capable of navigating the world with. In this contemporary state of affairs I speak of egotistical individualism for example, or a similar ideology.
You identify your own self and locate it in relation to other selves in the context of national or international institutions, and this schema works just fine in a stable society. In times of instability, however, these means of semantic compression become problematic. In times of social disintegration, these means start to actually break down, because macro-disintegration inevitably reaches down into the constructed self.
The actual process is incredibly complex. One has to come to terms with the incredible paradox in which efforts to increase stability, to arrange life units into self-serving organizations, necessarily contributes to their increasing instability. Life tends to be most stable when it is allowed to run its natural course, which doesn't always produce the state of affairs one necessarily wants.
This is because the true nature of the universe is such that life is composed of a multitude of striving entities, as illustrated by the concept of 10,000 functions in Buddhist philosophy. Life is matter organized to sustain collections of energy which are constantly dispersing into space, and this is accomplished by combining ever more complex associations of organized matter into units which can direct those organizations to work in harmony to better manipulate the environment to preserve those energy differentials.
In times of instability, each of these tiers of organized matter are working against each other, just as individuals relating to each other in institutions and other social forms are working against each other, so that while identifying them as unities achieves certain practical functions, there comes that inevitable time when one has to sit down and rethink one's conceptions of the universe in a radical way, down to the very basics.
