If the goal is understanding what's wrong with the world, rather than merely obtaining a satisfying story about what's wrong with the world, then the strongest path is usually:

1. Investigate institutions
2. Study economics, history, psychology, and incentives
3. Engage politically or civically where appropriate
4. Maintain a philosophical or spiritual framework if it helps you orient yourself
5. Avoid nihilism and grand conspiracy cosmologies as explanatory defaults

In other words: start with reality before ideology.

The difficulty is that reality is often disappointing. People want a single villain, a hidden cabal, a secret reset, a lost utopia, or a master key that explains everything.

Unfortunately, the world is usually broken by dozens of overlapping causes:

• Bureaucratic incentives
• Status competition
• Regulatory capture
• Short-term political thinking
• Human "tribalism"
• Technological change
• Demographic pressures
• Economic trade-offs
• Ordinary incompetence

This is much less cinematic than discovering that the Patriarchs erased Free-Energy Tartaria with giant weather machines.

As for religion, it depends on what you're looking for.

Religion can provide:

• Meaning
• Moral orientation
• Community
• A framework for suffering

Those are real human needs.

Where people get into trouble is when religion becomes a substitute for investigating the material causes of problems.

Likewise, economics can explain incentives but cannot tell you what is worth pursuing.