When I was growing up there were three major grand schemes that explained the entire world.
I first explored the Marxist model, and thanks to George Orwell's Animal Farm and a few months on a kibbutz I realized it was inappropriate for real human beings. Just an ideological superstructure for people who needed a universal explanation.
I next explored the world of Sigmund Freud. It was a wonderful explanatory model for most of the world and included an historical explanation of Moses. I even spent a few sessions with a Freudian shrink. Freudianism had some inherent failures because it didn't have a simple process like ‘revolution’ to bring it to fruition. It required decades of self-examination which rapidly appeared to me to be navelgazing rather than learning.
I also spent time discussing the theology of the Catholic Church in its most elegant form as taught by the Jesuits. The problems with an external world as a source of rewards and punishments to maintain the tentpole of a living world created dissonance for me.
I could have looked at Social Darwinism or many of the lesser universal structures. Fortunately I was finished with this search for universalism by the time I was 23.
From that point on I have had a strong resistance to any form of universal human understanding. In fact I gravitated toward the anthropological view of culture which finds a wide variety of different mutually independent human social structures. I gravitated to commerce which has no universal theory and no theory whatsoever.
For a person with intellectual yearnings, such as myself, the only answer seems to be a vast accumulation of experiences and a willingness to live with horrific ambiguity. That is the definition of commerce as an organizing conception.