ishmael

"Mother Culture, whose voice has been in your ear since the day of your birth, has given you an explanation of how things came to be this way. You know it well; everyone in your culture knows it well. But this explanation wasn't given to you all at once. No one ever sat you down and said: "Here is how things came to be this way, beginning ten or fifteen billion of years ago right up to the present". Rather, you assembled this explanation like a mosaic: from a million bits of information presented to you in various ways by others who share that explanation. You assembled it from the table talk of your parents, from cartoons you watched on television, from Sunday School lessons, from your textbooks and teachers, from news broadcasts, from movies, novels, sermons, plays, newspapers, and all the rest. The explanation of HOW THINGS CAME THIS WAY is ambient in your culture. Everyone knows it and everyone accepts it without question."

( Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn )