Our Idols Have Feet of Clay Yes, that is what I am positing. I am currently thinking of culture a a cloud. That is not an exhaustive metaphor, but it serves the purpose of explaining why we can't see other cultures, or even our own nature. As Confucius said, born alike, but by practice far apart. It is an obvious generalization since even within cultures, many of us are different with differing capacities, and abilities, but I think autochthonous humans spent several hundred thousand years before the culture cloud developed, so there was evolutionary value in what we were. I'm not saying culture is bad, it gives us enjoyment, enrichment, etc., but our evolutionary instincts suffer from the cloud. There is no logical reason why we can't solve many problems.