Hi Andrew,
This reminds me of a post I wrote last year - Kub933's Journal - #1144 by Kub933. There was an image I included in it which I still like a lot, although it is quite dramatic hehe :
I wrote that “this was what it felt like for ‘me’ to face up to ‘humanity’s wisdom’ 
A wisdom which after a thorough review turned out to be a joke…”
But I still remember the enormous ‘weight’ of it, it seems this is what you are getting at here. Well we all know of a particularly naive farmboy who proceeded right through all this, because somebody had to be the first (and now the next), the cost of maintaining the status quo was simply too much and the prize which lay on the other side was way too precious to ignore.