The basis of your claim appears to be "people are incredibly complicated, everything ties in to everything, therefore we can make no claims about what works and

The basis of your claim appears to be "people are incredibly complicated, everything ties in to everything, therefore we can make no claims about what works and what doesn't." To which I respond: if things were truly that un-understandable, we would have been unable as a species to have additive culture that improves over time, because what we think about how people and the world work vs. the actuality of things would be too divorced from one another. And yet we can positively point to growth of knowledge across all human endeavors, in societies around the globe. I therefore fundamentally disagree with your proposition. Which is ok. It's fine to agree to disagree. We could both be wrong, after all. :)