Here are some brief remarks on your link, El Nino:
It’s not news that our beliefs are shaped by our environment which includes the society in which we live. It can easily happen that society is wrong about certain of its beliefs and that we are led by our society to believe those falsehoods. They might even be false beliefs that function to guarantee the relative comfort of a certain segment of society; e.g. we might believe that “all poverty is born of laziness.” Those who benefit by such a belief might in fact propagate it. None of this requires a conspiracy. There needn’t be a secret cabal in the recesses of government that set it all in motion. (Indeed, why is the government always the bad guy in these conspiracy scenarios, why not the pseudo-intellectual political think-tanks?) Of course our thoughts are not entirely our own. In fact it’s damn hard to come up with an original idea that’s viable in the market place of ideas. That’s simply part of the natural memetic evolution of ideas. The narrator in your linked clip is rather like the 19th century thinker who cannot imagine that evolution could’ve proceeded without gods to initiate and guide it.
