This may not be anything particularly new and may be obvious to most people, but to me, it was new so I’m going to share it. Ideas are historical. There it is. It is that simple. The explanation and implications are the complex and challenging part. Really though, ideas are formed, altered, or superseded by newer ones within a historical context. This context has social, religious and economic forces that act upon these ideas. Intuitively we know this. We know that we are members of a temporal dimension where events happen in a particular order and have a series of causes. This is important because many presume that ideas, particularly the ideas that they are fond of, always were. This just isn’t the case. Yes, I’m sorry to break the news to you. They presume that, because *they* like them, that most people must like them. Maybe it is because these ideas stood some test of time and reflection. This doesn’t mean that all old ideas are terrible and only new ideas are worth anything of value. It is important to reflect on the notion that ideas were built around societal pressures. These pressures could have been responsible for the debunking of myths of the origins of the universe (Thales), creating political systems to protect people (Hobbes) and a host of other topics. Many of the ideas that we have were born from times which are far removed from us with motivations that no longer apply to us and yet their seeming utility forces us to adopt them as if they always were “proper” and “correct”. I’m painting with a broad brush with regards to ideas since they can be moral values, religious beliefs or natural observations, but I think this initial realization may challenge us to approach ideas we are confronted with care and caution. Unfortunately, this requires some “heavy lifting”.