"Remember Me" -- The Epitaph of the Narcissist

I can order a calculator online that, for just ten dollars, accomplishes more than what the greatest inventors and scientists of two-hundred years ago could have imagined possible. The fortunes spent by these predecessors, and the years spent frustrated over building devices to accomplish mere arithmetic--all this human struggle--has culminated into what anymore amounts to a cheap device to be taken for granted. It occurs to me that the motivation to discover derives not from interest in the knowledge for its own sake, but in the reward meted out for its initial discovery, as the second to do so finds no recognition or compensation. There is an distinction then between the intrinsic value of knowledge and the social advantages afforded in being credited for it (by being attributed when others come into that same knowledge). As is historically the case, for two possessors of any given knowledge, one is attributed as infinitely deserving, the other as not--the difference arbitrarily rationalized by the elapsing of time in between the two people. There is something disgusting about the way knowledge is attributed to the "first-haver" of it--the Pythagorean Theorem cannot be invoked without incidentally paying intellectual royalty to the decayed corpse of Pythagoras. It is as though that knowledge, of the summative proof of triangle dimensions, is to some degree equated with an importance to bolster the ego of one (even dead!) person.