ABSTRACT
Some of us seem so in awe of our ideas, any ideas, that we place them on a pedestal, where we suppose them to be ever superior to us and our control. Plato went as far as to claim that we are too degraded a vessel of ideas to have been their originator-he contended, instead, that what we think of as our ideas are actually distorted reflections of a perfection that resides elsewhere, out there, somewhere. Hegel’s “spirit of an age,” in contrast, is clearly a product of human minds, and very useful for explaining confluences in popular culture. But, as Popper (1972, pp. 175-176) points out, the reciprocal impact that culture has on our minds — the way that we not only shape our culture but are in turn shaped by it-“becomes with Hegel omnipotent…and degenerates into the doctrine that the great man is something like a medium in which the Spirit of the Epoch expresses itself.”
