What can I Believe

-A quote- "What can I believe?" It was proper for a person of his generation to believe that individuals needed a profound sense of their own limitations. Traditions were surely the most controlling element in a secure society. People had to know the boundaries of their time, of their society, of thinking, of territory. What was wrong with the hearth as a model for all thinking? A sense of enclosure should pervade every individual choice-should fence in family, the community and every step taken by a proper government. And he tried to fall back on the traditional catechisms of his people. "Each aspect of life required a single form, its inherent circularity based on a secret inner knowledge of what will work and what will not work. The model for life, for the community, for every element of the larger society right up to and beyond the peaks of government; sameness and stability."

And this has led me down the road, to the cliff, to the very edge of limits.

Applied to me, applied to my life, applied to all I can encompass within the range of my imagination and it leads me to this:
All I know, traditions, values, roles, modes of thinking, even definitions of emotions are all based on the evolution of my environment. These ideas did not simply fall out of my head. The shape of our cognitive abilities are the result of evolution and adaption to the situation at hand. Like the strongest survive, does it not make sense for the fittest mode of thought to perpetuate?

And I am on this cliff, this thin edge, poised to make the leap into the shadows, into the areas of humanity that exist in contrast to those ideas of sameness and stability.

A note: I remember reading or seeing something like humans are the only entities able to hold two complete opposite ideas in their heads and not explode with the effort of understanding.