Our ideas are so successful that we dominate the plants and the animals with our civilization. The problem is that we humans have not only dominated the plants and animals, but we have managed to dominate our own selves as well. That is the paradox of power — it may give you control, but it enslaves you, too.
We created our human environment just as our animal ancestors created theirs, through repeatedly ritualing with qualia in the physical world. The difference is that the animals evolved with their landscapes over many millions of years, but our complex human qualiascapes are not even fifty-thousand years old (that is about how recently we began using symbols and languages). Even though we have evolved with our ideas, we haven’t appropriately adapted to the environment which those ideas are creating. Even though they allow us to dominate the plants and the animals, we are not really in control.