Cultural forces normalize
Create zeitgeist
Spirit time
Paradigms that channel thoughts down passageways carved over millennia
Ordering our ideas into binary sets of good or bad
Creating standard subjectivity and judgmental negativity
What we like
What we don’t like
Standards of beauty
Behavioral expectations
Perceived handles to lift reality
Yet so often these devices, crude constructs of mob mentality
Fail
Fail to take into account random chance
Fail to recognize evidence contrary to expectations
Cultural norms seep into our consciousness
Making us lazy as we take refuge in the safety of numbers
Dumbing us down
From the real geniuses
Who created the first civilizations
Who didn’t rely on normal
Since there wasn’t any
That would come later
At first, at the beginning
There were no shortcuts for the neural pathways
Each moment was a discovery and a delight
Each observation adding to analysis and evaluation
Creating patterns, not following them
Yet we cling to the illusion that we’re getting smarter
Even as we keep getting farther from the truth
David Trudel © 2012
createdavidt 
Wow. I am loving this, David. Each moment a discovery and a delight. We cheat ourselves of that.
Fantastic piece. The ending is so thoughtful and harrowing.
I agree – cultural norms anaesthetise
Deny us discovery and surprise
But normality is also the board
Which makes playing possible at all
We must take care not to deride
New intelligence we do not recognise
Great poetic response! Love it.
Thanks! This was prompted in part by recently reading some of Zecharia Sitchin’s writings on ancient Sumer, and then the other day a geneticist published a paper that said that ancient humans at the dawn of civilization were smarter than we are today. But what started me on this was realizing that I was allowing cultural norms to influence my judgment negatively.