The average person in the West carries around in their head a set of assumptions that are culturally imbibed. Assumptions such as the idea that spirituality is preferable to organized religion, that love is a feeling not a discipline, that if something is mundane it must be boring, that individual freedom trumps the collective, that travel broadens the mind, or that we can do what we like as long as it does not hurt anybody. . . . None of these values and ideas are taught in school; rather one picks them up the way we pick up a head cold.

—Mark Sayers, The Road Trip That Changed the World