It is profoundly difficult to find anyone to converse with upon matters of import — the great questions — the questions that face us as animals, human beings, ‘citizens’, workers, and so on. But especially the more profound questions. Nearly impossible. The reason is as strange as it is obvious: nearly everyone has already been largely converted to the proponent of a paradigm of one sort or another that they have adopted from within human culture. People come to believe the basic kinds of things that the other people with whom they would like to associate or be associated come to believe.

We thusly form rather boldly reckless collectives with excessive degrees of agreement and impoverished capacities for self-evaluation, insight, discovery or something more reminiscent of actual (and active) intelligence.

If you wish to speak with someone whose mind is at once skillful, trained, knowledgeable and liquid… someone who has few if any dogmatic accoutrements and is a viable partner for serious discussions, you will have to find someone uncommon. It is such minds I crave and love… who strive to learn beyond their own familiar terrain, and who sagely avoid membership in cults of identity or obtuse systems of (often rather insipid) metaphysics.