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Take a pencil for example.

You know you can write with it, but where did you learn it from? Perhaps a teacher or your parents told you. But this particular piece of knowledge went "viral" thousands of years ago. And someone taught the teacher. And before that, someone else. If you rewind back hundreds, if not thousands, of years, this "knowledge virus" about the pencil is still alive, still spreading, transmitting the same basic idea: this tool leaves a mark on paper.

Now we literally know what it means to go viral.

(I understand that many would prefer to erase 2020 from their memories, but we have experienced first-hand what it means to have something literally go viral.)

If you've had COVID-19, imagine how many people before you carried the same strain of the virus. If you trace the chain, somewhere at the beginning there was the original source, "patient zero," and then the virus went viral and through a chain of people reached you. Technically, this virus passed through many people, and you ended up, say, a carrier in the seventy-third generation.

Knowledge works the same way. It's passed down from person to person, from generation to generation; everyone passes it on, and more often than not, no one stops to consider where it originally came from.

This is essentially how we learn everything in the world.