Leave it to Plato to lay the exalted foundation for America's idealization of concepts such as Freedom and Democracy. Yet, how much exploitation and little-reported crime has been perpetrated in the name of  Freedom? How much devastation via presumption has been inflicted to establish Democracy as a foreign policy objective?

Then came Aristotle and Hegel to help counter this top-heavy approach to civilization. 

Observation of a postulated theory, as Thesis, with the results of experimentation, as Antithesis, leading to a new theory, as better Thesis, has ushered in the modern age of man. Yet, how much upsetting damage has been done, by civil and religious laws or commercial marketing, by ignoring the whole as greater(better?) than its parts? What about the insidious influence of bias, as even found in the Communist Manifesto's reference to those classed by "lumpen-proletariat" as social scum?

No wonder our post-modern world, in general, and Quakers, in particular, have slipped into solipsism.

When the whole/ideal is no longer reverenced as holy, and patience with "the process" of experimentation and corporate discernment wanes; then one person's junky experience is another's religion.