Q: You have talked about earning your knowledge. How do you define this and earn it? When is it ok to debate ideas like yours if they are not your own?
JPB: I would say it's okay to debate them right away if what you're trying to do is to test them and learn more about them. It’s not okay if you're trying to put them forward as if they're your own and to obtain something approximating unearned moral superiority by doing so. That means to have the ideas and to discuss them but not to identify with them as if they are defining features of your own personality.
How do you earn knowledge?
All your elementary school teachers, when you're writing an essay, said you got to put it in your own words. Think, well what does that mean? You can’t just copy a sentence - it has to be in your own words... and that was never very well explained to me but there was something to it.
For knowledge to be yours you have to integrate it with your own experience. You have to see how that applies to your own case and then have story to tell about how that's the case - that’s personal, right?
So it's the intermingling of the abstract with the personal that makes it real. It’s the intermingling of the epic with the particular, or the archetypal with the concrete that makes something real. So if an idea is still an abstraction, if you're just parroting it - it also means that you haven’t learned to use it as a tool, you haven’t started to apply it in your own life.
You could say, “well here’s an idea that I came across, and here‘s how I implemented it, and here's what I learned when I implemented it...” and then that’s definitely yours. You can kind of tell because you’re recounting your knowledge in a manner that no one else could do and that’s what gives it that ring of genuineness. That's what it means in some sense to speak from the heart.
It’s like, “well here's my experience with this idea,” and you can say too “well here‘s how I understand this idea,” and you reformulate that in your own terms. And that means that you associate it with the unique particularities of your own experience. Then I would also say it means that you've acted out the ideas and tested them in the world and that you have your own stories to tell about that. And that's how you make it your own.
It’s like you go to the tool store, the hardware store and you buy a hammer. Then you start to use the hammer to hammer in nails and you learn how to use the hammer. You learn how to use the saw and then at some point that saw sort of becomes yours. You know how to use it.
It’s the same with these ideas. You don't just say the words. You're not just a puppet mouthing the words. It becomes part and parcel of your own philosophy, the way that you perceive the world, the way that you construe things and the way that you act in the world. You've tested them and you have something to add to them that's yours personally.
If you're having a discussion with someone and they’re talking about things that don’t have those characteristics, that they haven't made personal, then the conversation is almost never interesting.
It’s because the person is just really are an empty shell through which ideology, clichés and slogans are pouring. There’s nothing about that that’s compelling because you don't see the grappling - you don't see that the other person has grappled with the ideas and come to their own unique conclusions. It really is in that mingling of the abstract and the particular that compelling wisdom is to be found.
Then concretely speaking, there’s ways of earning your knowledge and part of that is reformulating it in your own words. That’s thinking it through, right? Discussing it until you have it at hand you can talk about it and you can generalize from it because you truly understand it. A huge part of that is also putting it into practice then deriving your own conclusions as a consequence. And some of that can be done with debate.
It's like, “here's an idea I came across and here's the idea and here’s what I think it means. This is how I think it would change things if I put it into practice. This is how I understand this idea and what do you think of that?”
That's a good debate or discussion because then the other person can say, “well ,I don't really agree with the way you've formulated that,” or “I don't agree with your conclusions,” and hopefully it's a real discussion and not just one up-man-ship (because that's a pretty dull game). Then you get clearer about what it is that the idea is and how it is that you would use it as a tool in your own life. That's the right way to think about ideas too.
Partly they're tools for looking at the world with because you have to look at the world with tools because you can't look at the whole world. So you're looking at the world through a tool-like structure and then the ideas themselves are tool-like and they need to be used and worn a bit in your hands before they're yours.
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. Lessons are the purpose of being here and I get it more and more every time I read SOTT or come here. 
