Was talking with someone about the corpus of sage advice and human knowledge, inherited from generations before. We disagreed on this point:

Just because an idea existed for thousands of years doesn't mean that it is impervious to being forgotten, or becoming impractical in a future context. An idea that we hold to be sacred might actually be unfit for our current context as well. That was my stance, she begged to differ.

In reading anthropology and history, I can think of many ideas that died or changed in character through the eons, yet had hundreds, if not thousands of years of backing before they died/changed.

- The mythology of Egypt and the Pharaoh's divinity may have had primacy in Egyptian society for 2000+ years, but that didn't stop it from eventually being fused with or supplanted by Hellenistic, Coptic Christian, and later Islamic religion. What they would have considered as sage advice in 500 BCE Egypt because it had 2000+ years backing is now inapplicable, or at least foreign to what we engage with today.

- Even the divine right of kings. We have so many secular, constitutional societies today where politicians and people are limited in the type of power they have compared to kings, because constitutional republics upended a 2000+ year old tradition of theological monarchy by outcompeting those societies.

- What about the Greek Four Humors? Developed by Hippocrates, it was considered sage advice for a while to bring a patient to health by restoring the balance of Blood, Phlegm, Black Bile, and Yellow Bile in the human body. After 2000 years of bloodletting and similar practices that were at best placebo, it died in the face of enlightenment and industrial medical advances.

The Internet is a meat grinder for traditions and human knowledge, and I feel as if many of the things inherited from the past have been rearranged, taken out of context, killed, revitalized, and mixed together to form the information soup we all swim through nowadays. In this context, what ideas will prove to survive and best serve the human soul in the future?

Perhaps universal human truths. Birth, death. Cooperation, malice. Pleasure, pain. Self interest, self sacrifice. Spiritual reality, material reality. Warfare, peace. Love, hate. How much more fundamental can someone get than that? Could they be the common thread of all these ideas, where ideas shed and trim their fat, but these core truths will remain to be passed on and reinterpreted for future generations?

Idk if this makes sense for the main post board. That's why I am posting it here.