Is the immense advancement of knowledge in our time a reflection of continuous intellectual development, or is it merely an excessive symptom of a stubbornly persistent intellectual stagnation in Western culture? Could it be that the progress is more pronounced the more it seeks to cover up an intellectual void? Does this supposed advancement of knowledge lead to a regression of the mind? Through four examples, the author briefly examines the issue of whether the contemporary postulate of reducing complexity at all costs in already complicated areas such as the relationship between genome/environment, mathematics/numerical sense, mind/matter, and cosmology (keyword: theory of everything) actually undermines three established principles of modern knowledge acquisition, which are: Exotericism instead of E.