A society's conversation defines and forms much of an individual's understanding of the world. When beliefs and images are uncontested or are even just dominant within a given society, individuals typically come to accept them as self- evident truths. Just as people today accept that the earth revolves around the sun, and once accepted that the sun revolves around the earth, so too have many people culturally ubiquitous images...The capacity of an individual to diverge from prevailing cognitive models is still smaller because cognitive models are among the individual's building blocks of understanding, and are incorporated into the structures of his mind as naturally as the grammar of his language. An individual learns the cognitive models of his culture, like grammar, surely and effortlessly. They each ... guide the understanding and production for forms that depend on them, contributing to the generation, in the case of grammar, of sentences and meaning, and in the case of cognitive models, of perceptions of the social world and articulated beliefs about it.

— Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners