Some things seem to get more and more complex as time goes on, and they show little sign of slowing down: science, technology, culture...society, in general. As our lives become more complex, we require more and more commonly held beliefs with which to feel our way around. Our society is progressively becoming a deeper and deeper reflection of the human mind, where ideas about life are systematized and in-grained into the world we experience.
I think of it like the process of learning a skill...say, fishing. You start out as child, with little more than worms and a cane pole...as you get more proficient, you invest in a rod and reel, carry a small tackle box, and remember to start bringing sunglasses...your skill grows even further, and you have a whole series of different fishing rods for different situations, an array of tackle to address varying conditions, knowledge of basic patterns of fish behavior...you continue honing your skill, and soon you have more rods than you find time to use, enough tackle to handle absolutely any conditions, a boat, fishing vests, specialty tools, and a library of learned patterns and probabilities that you can call upon at anytime.
What's the downside? Well, everything has lost it's apparent mystery. The child with a can of worms could've sat for hours with the hope of catching some strange fish out of a pond, whereas the professional will take one look and determine that the body of water is not a prime habitat for the growth of large gamefish, and that only small catches can be had at some remote location across the water, and that it's not worth wasting time there. "He loses his sense of wonder", as Alan Watts so often said. The world, to him, is completely known. No longer does he feel excitement at dropping a line into the water to see what emerges from the depths. He thinks he knows...so he doesn't even bother. It's funny, though. I've been fishing for years and years (which is partly why I chose the analogy), and I'm always surprised to hear about children catching admirable fish in the most unlikely places, where no 'pro' would ever be caught dead. How do they do it? It's not because they are particularly skilled, but because they don't have enough skill or knowledge to be perpetually lead to the statistically best spots where everyone else goes.
If you turn back the clock by 10,000 years or so, the mere unexplainable existence of the Sun and the stars was enough to make any man question the certainty of his ideas. But our age is emerging as one of the first in the history of mankind where we arguably 'know too much'. Gone are the days when a person's mind was left to thinking about his small tribe and whatever untouched wilderness inspired. Our society is made of more than just massive, immobile buildings...it is made of massive, unmoveable ideas, too...lots of them. Each one of them is built upon a foundation of hundreds of millions of individual minds. Metaphysically speaking, you can look at society as a collective mind. To the degree that man's mind is no longer 'just his', is also the same degree to which societal complexity can flourish. Again, the problem here is 'knowing too much'. We have so much knowledge about our world that it seems that our knowledge offers more mystery than the world which originally inspired it! It is only in this confusion that society tends to become a self-defeating proposition...a structure that celebrates the past and the knowledge it has provided exclusively, and so ends up collectively repeating the same mistakes over and over again...falling for the same scams...running head-long into the same doomed situations. Individual minds that 'snap out of it' are, by and large, helpless to do too much more than go with the flow, as flowperson so appropriately mentioned. An individual mind can and does change the world, but changing the ideas of the collective mind is a different story.
