The Sichuan Broadcasts

I often disbelieved what was said, but I never suspected the people who spoke. I didn't lie. How could I have imagined that others were able to tell lies deliberately?

   When I was asked questions about things I wanted to hide, I just didn't answer. Early, I had realized that silences might be more eloquent than answers. From my refusing to answer certain questions, it might have been possible to figure out the things I wanted to hide. I perfected the defenses of my intimacy by devising a system of random mutism. I left the most trivial questions unanswered, as if unheard, assuming at the oddest occasions an air of thoughtful absentmindedness. I let them die out in thin air so often, that it was impossible to gather that I didn't want to answer some of them. I was considered to be a fairly normal kid, usually happy and rather reckless, but for a promising reading addiction and a disturbing tendency of not hearing questions.
  I was a strange little thing: inordinately suspicious and utterly gullible. I took seriously the most extravagant claims. The more extravagant, the more seriously I took them actually. I would never have set a claim without a ground for it. How could anyone else do otherwise? I found books in Grandfather's library that made the most exorbitant assertions. I started to read them. They said that, if people believed but didn't know, science knew but didn't think. They said that Ignorance, Error and Prejudice, were unworthy enemies, who were easily defeated by reasoning. There were far worse foes, powerful and dangerous: Opinion, Illusion and Lie. A great war had been launched against them two thousand and five hundred years ago; the fight was still going on and the outcome was uncertain. I had met the Philosophers. I had found friends unhoped for and new enemies aplenty.
  They were a weird lot, those philosophers. They seemed to spend more time warring among themselves than fighting the enemy. They even accused each other of being one of the enemy. In the beginning, I had been lucky to meet only one of them. I had read him without suspecting that others had come after him, and he made so much fun of the ones who had come before him, that I didn't think it necessary to read them. When I decided to enter philosophy, I had no idea it was a madhouse. In the enthusiasm of discovery, and from a total lack of experience of the world, I had set my mind to become a professional philosopher. To that end, I had to study them all. With the naïveté of the neophyte, I thought that the one who had come last must be right, since he could draw upon all his predecessors and upon the modern achievements, or shortcomings, of science. I began to read the ultimate philosopher, the last one that had been heard about in Marseille that is. When I arrived in Paris, I was astonished to find that he wasn't the last. Others had come since, and some of them were alive. And they were doing it again! They claimed that everybody had been wrong so far, and everything had to be started all over again. And they did it. They produced unheard of ontologies and made up, with varying fortunes, entirely new systems.
  I started to suspect suspicion. Maybe this truth building was the biggest of all big lies? I met a distinguished Agrégé de Philosophie, who happened to be the bearded Israelite chaplain of the Sorbonne.