If you haven't already read it, you should check out "The Four Agreements" by Don Miguel Ruiz.

One of the mental models I gained from that book was (paraphrasing):

Society (other people) will try to program us with their own accumulated poison, and our job is to

(a) resist these poisonous worldviews/ideas/patterns instead of unthinkingly osmosing them "because a grown-up or peer said so", and

(b) not pass our own poison(s) along to others.