Journalists are professional test-crammers. Our job is to get an assignment on Monday morning and by Tuesday evening act like we’re authorities on intellectual piracy, the civil war in Yemen, Iowa caucus procedure, the coronavirus, whatever. We actually know jack: we speed-read, make a few phone calls, and in a snap people are inviting us on television to tell millions of people what to think about the complex issues of the world.
That is why, as soon as I was old enough to emerge from the control of my teachers, I entirely abandoned scholarship. Resolving to seek no knowledge except what I could find in myself or read in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth travelling, visiting courts and armies, mixing with people of different temperaments and ranks, gathering various experiences, testing myself in the situations that luck put me into, and always reflecting on whatever came my way so as to profit from it. For it seemed to me that I could find much more truth in the reasonings that people make about matters that concern their interests than in a scholar’s closeted reasonings about theoretical matters. In the former case, if a person judges wrongly he will soon be punished for this by the upshot; whereas in the latter case there are no practical consequences, and there is nothing at stake for the scholar except perhaps that the further his conclusions are from common sense the prouder he will be of them because he will have had to use so much more skill and ingenuity in trying to make them plausible! All through this I had an intense desire to learn to distinguish the true from the false, in order to understand my own actions and to proceed with confidence in this life.