“We have become confused in ways that are so profound that they reflect back upon our understanding of ourselves. It is true that part of the reason that most children learn with great interest and seeming rapidity is that they are developmentally accelerated by the biocognitive circumstances of youth.

But culture and perspective play major roles in our developmental plasticity, and the latter is infinitely variable and effective. Human beings are called into expression by nature, peers, and culture. Were these abilities and assets not shut down by the cues of culture and peers, nature would naturally draw then into a series of evolutionary leaps. In this situation, many adults would learn -faster and more flexibly- even than children. This is a danger to any established culture whose frameworks resist radical and sudden transformation.

The representational cultures now dominant must shut down the fluid learning capacities present in all of us as children in order to survive in their current form. Were adults to retain anything approaching the learning flexibility and prowess of of children, the dominant cultures wouldn’t last a week. And they would not merely be modified, either. They would be discarded entirely, as they should be, for they are not only failures as cultures, they are active inhibitors of human fellowship, intelligence, development, survival, and identity.

Somehow, in our fear of religions, we have established secular gods more deadly, more powerful, and more effective than any religious force in human history. And its purpose is clear: it must so actively inhibit our intelligence and ability to organize human agreement that it can not only survive, but conscript us to its service, elaboration, support, defense, and fealty.

This is approximately equivalent to having your intelligence governed by a parasite that only allows it to develop enough to eat some of it and grow, but never to notice, threaten, or eject it.

It is this we call ‘civilization’, circa 2013″

— an anonymous informant