I think you're talking about human freedom when you say we're more childlike than chimpanzees because monkeys are more instinctive or otherwise frozen along their course of development and expression. We gained mental access to our thoughts and attitudes, so we can play and experiment with ideas.

I agree that it's crucial to specify the exact sense in which I'm saying that culture is childish since obviously this could be just a cheap metaphor. I try to do this throughout the series, but it's not so easy to state with precision. I forgot to say in the last comment that there's another article in the series (all of which are already written), on mental illness. But I've wanted to write another on the phenomenology of being a cultured adult, and how this compares to being a child.

Maybe what you're saying about the freedom deriving from symbolic expression, and our long childhood development could help flesh out that article. I'll have to think about this because the crucial point would be whether working with technical, sophisticated issues as an adult professional somehow amounts to a Kafkaesque, comedic absurdity. I do express this point throughout the series, that it's like taking a children's game as gospel, and forgetting that it's fundamentally just a game. But what's it like to deliberately play a game and to treat a game as though it were something else?