a story is true, a story is untrue

“The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what one has lived through. Most people had not lived—nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died—through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain.”

"For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads: "We came in peace for all Mankind." As the United States was dropping 7 ½ megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock."

What Seeing Like a State is about is how there's this incredibly detailed, I'm going to call it folk wisdom, which is the knowledge that you derive from living in a place for a really long time and getting really good at living there. High modern projects that attempt to rationalize how people live often ignore this wisdom and scrub it away. To me, top-down world building that attempts to, as you say, map out all the causal chains of how everything works is itself an attempt to render the whole world legible, to make a census of it, to be able to answer to your reader: this is how this works. [...] What you should be doing, you should be figuring out not the end product, not the final causal map of how your settings work, but the rules of both the setting and the narrative in the setting that govern how these causal chains happen. Not mapping every link in the chain, but giving the reader an idea of how each link is shaped and where it comes from and who forges it with what intent, and teaching the reader how to imagine the world in the same way that you're imagining it. So when they look at the edge of the map and wonder what's over there, they can think about it in the same way that you are, and the story goes on living in their heads, and the characters go on living in their head, and there's this deep connection between the logic of the setting and the characters and the choices they make in the plot.