RE: Nothing is Original - Plagiarism is not steemits greatest enemy
I don't think the problem is plagiarism per se, but "fraud", in the sense that one seeks to be rewarded by presenting it as something they worked on. Naturally, those defrauded feel angered.
As for the generalization that everything is not original, personally, as far as my philosophical and psychological texts go, I try to not only create material that is original in its expression, but also in its content as well as its ability to expand the mind in ways that have not been approached before. This is exceedingly difficult (several orders of magnitude more difficult than repackaging and restating known things), but doable.
Whether I'm talking about gold being a "constant" in a virtual reality program, placed there by the virtual reality programmer to act as "money", or how the subconscious observer acts to enhance or limit our potential, or why the dollar collapse won't occur (backed by facts that are elusive to mainstream and alternative sources alike), I like to set the bar pretty high.
unless you were born with a compendium of philosophical and psychological texts stored in your brain, that knowledge came from someone else. You may express it in your own words but the concepts are not created by you. Thus the term 'there is nothing new under the sun' has a huge truth attached to it.
Psychology, at its most distilled level, is about understanding yourself to understand the world. If you don't understand yourself, how are you going to understand others?
The main tool is to observe and analyze your own thought process to gain new insights. It cannot be done by another for you, because nobody has access to your thoughts. Your thoughts and your observations on those thoughts, are -by necessity- your own.
you obtain that level in terms of knowledge you gain from external sources thus your insights may be unique to you but they are not new. Your level of obtuse ability is rather good though. :)