You can basically take apart any word and find various other words organized in networks of meaning which support the initial word, and then you can take those other words apart in turn. And you can keep doing this for some time, until you get down to utterances and physical structures and energy which may require another discipline to talk about (which can also be analyzed), or which cannot be talked about at all.
This takes energy and work. You have to focus on the word itself, and then think about what the word means, locate other words that support the meaning of it, and then relate all of those things to reality via image, memory, logic, and etc.
When the meaning of a word or even a discourse has been collectively established, then it can be regularly used with much less work required. This allows for greater and more complex structures of meaning to be built up, which can have enormous explanatory and predictive power.
But there is a cost to this too. Because any sort of problems intrinsic to a lower level of meaning will migrate right up through those higher structures, and be essentially ignored by those wishing to use the lower without any additional analytic or critical work. At least until the entire structure becomes unfeasible as an analytic tool, and then the whole thing has to be taken apart again. Of course only a portion of this process is actually conscious.
To drive the point home, I think of doing physical, material work. You actually see this phenomena quite a bit in maintenance and repair work. There are structural factors that go beyond mere cost, which work to limit the scope of a given repair.
Say there is a sewer main that needs to be dug up and corrected. Perhaps it is sitting too flat and water is not running and there are blockages. The part that is going to be attempted to be repaired is the part that is most readily accessible, where the most good can be done for the lowest cost.
So the part of the sewer that is underneath dirt and concrete will be improved, while the sections running underneath housing or other complex structures will be left alone for the time being. Breaking up concrete and digging up dirt is arduous: much work must go into digging out the actual trench and changing the pipe, and then even more work must be done to returning everything to its previous state when the pipe is repaired.
But the work required for removing occupants and tearing up housing in addition to digging is much more, and the work of restoring things to a previous state is much more, not to mention disruptive and invasive, and so problems in these areas will be avoided as long as possible.
But if there is some fundamental flaw, such as untenable sewer pipe underneath a whole apartment complex, or a flaw in a foundation, or problems with the land that everything is built upon, then every little fix that circumvents that flaw will be tried until it is no longer possible, and then the whole site becomes condemned or evacuated or whatever.
A given successful living system will do constant work to maintain its current state of organization. The greater scope of the system you seek to change, and the more that system is connected to other living systems in symbiotic relationships which must be changed in turn, the more resistance is encountered. Blowing up an entire system to remake it from scrap becomes improbable or even impossible, unless the system is forcibly taken apart by some large-scale failure or disaster.
The disaster capitalists and the privatizers and the financiers have discovered this principle and work by it very faithfully, inserting themselves in sites of disaster and implementing their agendas while everyone is busy surviving.
In the chaotic aftermath of a natural or human disaster, when one is in desperate need of a simple necessity like water or an overhead shelter, it becomes easier to accept whatever is offered without question, and those doing the offering are scrutinized much later, after they have had the time to situate themselves into the political and economic environment as a permanent fixture.
In this way ends are beginnings and beginnings are ends. Things that end, especially the larger in scope they are, tend to free up enormous amounts of energy towards new things.
