My aim, of course, was to talk with people who already have some experience or imagination with the difficulties involved, not to debate children insufficiently docile to learn. However, we must give the group every chance so far as a prolegomena can be deployed attendant to a plausibly existing presence of reason.
I’m speaking from a tradition that goes back at least to Plato, and is understood by the thoughtful part of the community to this day. It is no longer in power, and so passed off as idiosyncratic or “subjective”. We live at the first time, in the existence of anything, not just “the universe”, so to say, simply the first time, of large scale education. In the year 1900 less than 10 percent of the population completed high school. This is not a regular occurrence of the obviousness you are attributing to it. My chief investigations have had a close basis and sustaining energies in the works named Heidegger and Leo Strauss.
Now, I think your generic rioting is due to one thing most all. Thoughtful people recognize that experience is essentially untrustworthy. Someone bumps into you, did they do it on purpose? Experience requires understanding, and then that comes under already formed ideas. Thinking this through, considering many happenings, at length, one comes to see that experience is not in any direct way distinguishable from imagination. It easily happens that this attitude toward the imagination of others is taken for a kind of naivete, or lack of experience with simple people who put the uttermost trust in their own experiences (even though we all see, in others, the greatest mad nonsense passed off as experiential knowledge, and this is an every day experience gained from even five minute conversions with one’s fellows).
I know, for example, an attorney who has great experience of chem-trails. He looks in the absolute blue sky, there he sees a blight, a trail of grey-white hanging about, left from a plane. The CIA is up to its tricks again! He is positively scandalized by the fact that others don’t share his concern.
Again, a man of science, he has great experience of such and such happenings. Whenever x happens, he knows, through experience, y is behind it. It is wholly reliable knowledge. Yet, such things are often false. The “experience” consists in attributing y to x repeatedly.
Again, one has no experience of growing old or dying, but one is quite sure one knows all about it from smearing one’s imaginations with empathetic and compassionate notions gleaned from being about such beings who are dying. And so on.
In any case, conversion with transparently vindictive and essentially negative persons, unable to learn, such as yourself, palls infinitely.