"All people are equally entitled to the liberty of freely applying their reason, argued Spinoza. We are all capable of thinking and thought is our universal right. Our customs and traditions, values, language, upbringing and other cultural traits are tied to the specific nurturing environment and cultural tradition an individual belongs to, and therefore are not universal. The ability to apply rational thought, however, is something available to everyone. The only difference is that some people make use of it more frequently than others. (...) The concept of radical egalitarianism among people who accept the principles of argumentative public debate quickly established itself as the foundation of the scientific community, in which the content of an argument is more important than the person who utters it. Anyone who abides by the rules of the rational exchange of thought is welcome to contribute their ideas, which are later assessed by the scientific community. Unfortunately the principles of enlightenment in politics and wider society didn’t work out as well as in science. One important reason for this is that even though all people are capable of applying their reason and basing their decisions on relational analyses, in practice we don’t do this as often as we could. We tend to be guided automatically by the habits, beliefs and values of the cultural environment we live in. To stay alert and rationalize everything that is going on around us is not only very difficult but even practically impossible."
— Sašo Dolenc, in The Genius Who Never Existed, 2014, p. 123
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