The barriers to accomplishing anything worthwhile are always in place before we conceive of what it is we wish to accomplish. Those barriers are never personally devised by enemies or opponents. They are always there because the task worth doing is always more difficult than the easy things that we can do to keep body and soul together. Of course if no one tries to do the hard things that need to be done, like resolve conflicts and understand complex scientific principles, the world slides down the slippery slope of our own built up errors.
Why is that? Are we so flawed by our human nature or some dark original sin that all accomplishment must be done at the expense of huge effort?
Perhaps a glimpse of one cause of that inherent difficulty is possible if we analyze the nature of human thought. Thought is founded in language at any level where it evokes anything more than reactions to immediate events. If you can think of any concepts that are not founded in a language that you know how would you express them, even to yourself?
Since language is basic to all thought the limits of language are also definable as the limits to thought. Even more than that premise would imply, your ability to use language at least internally would circumscribe your capacity to think. Languages can be further described as a meme. Memes are self replicating structures that occupy the human brain and use human communication to convey themselves from one generation to another. They are the cultural genes of human thought processes.
A meme can be as simple as a rhyme or as sophisticated as a religion. The sum of all the memes that occupy your mind can be used to total the range of your intellectual development. Memes can be in conflict with one another or even with basic human drives and still thrive. Concepts like morals and ethics are conveyed as memes even though they were probably developed out of basic human social drives in their beginning. That is why artificially constructed memes like communism and capitalism are so imperfect at describing the human transactions that permit human economies to exist.
So we think in memes and use our perception of sometimes infinitely complex phenomena that are described in a sort of shorthand composed of memes to communicate those thoughts
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