You are forgetting the basic fact that most of our intelligence evolved for the purpose of winning at socialization and navigating tribal politics! Weather is weather, and huge centralized societies really are impossible to take in at a glance, and very hard to make predictions for - but there are still ansectrally familiar patterns everywhere, even where they aren't needed so much - say, ancient structures of dominance being replicated in the workplace - and human instincts can derive a lot of information from observing those patterns.

Although much of this information is going to be garbled or changed by the context, I still claim that people already have lots of "unknown knowns" about the tribal politics, families, work relations, etc that surround them - all simmering somewhere in the back on their minds - and that consciously interpreting and articulating these "unknown knowns" can, (as Zizek suggests in a few places, AFAIK), be more useful than trying a strictly positivist approach to social dynamics.