Take a species, any species, no not the Great Houses. Take humans for example. Tribal monkeys that evolved into political apes and then into cultural humans. Each culture can be considered a set of programming instructions that not only defines what each human member of the collective is but it allows for the potential of that human to find its own place as best fits its psyche. The individual is conditioned over time by stories, myths, urban legends, newspapers, TV stations, laws, propaganda et al. The individual becomes a product created by its past and present, however if you take the individual out of its culture and place it in another you get instant culture shock, the individual is cut adrift from everything it knows. There are to protocols on how to behave, no subtle clues as to what everyone else is thinking or planning to do. The individual enters a terrible psychosis of identity loss and must start over from scratch, a mewling newborn in perhaps an adult body. Even more insidious however, what if you start making subtle changes to a culture? A phrase here, an image there, a nod of the head instead of a shake? It's possible to reshape a culture slowly over time and it will never know it's happening. You can literally reprogram people to be what you want them to be. You can change who they are, change their very souls. Will they even know what they'll be anymore and if they realise, will they care, because everything around them says that nothing is wrong, therefore it must be them that's at fault. Why can't they connect properly? What's the frequency, Kenneth?