I take this explanation from the street. I heard one of the common people say, “he knew me right away.”

Then I asked myself: What is it that the common people take for knowledge?
What do they want when they want “knowledge”?

Nothing more than this: Something strange is to be reduced to something familiar.
And we philosophers have we really meant more than this
when we have spoken of knowledge?
What is familiar means what we are used to
so that we no longer marvel at it,
our everyday,

some rule in which we are stuck,
anything at all in which we feel at home.
Look, isn’t our need for knowledge
precisely this need for the familiar,
the will to uncover under everything
strange,
unusual,
and questionable
something that no longer disturbs us?

Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know?

And is the jubilation of those who attain knowledge
not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?

…When they (philosophers) find something
in things under them, or behind them that is unfortunately quite familiar to us
such as our multiplication tables
or our logic,
or our willing and desiring
– how happy they are right away!

For what is familiar is known: on this they are agreed.

…Error of errors!
What is familiar is what we are used to;
and what we are used to is most difficult to “know”
–that is to see as a problem;
that is, to see as strange,
as distant,
as “outside us.”

The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Walter Kaufmann, aphorism 355

We are all “common people” are we not?  No matter the formal education, awards, professional achievement — our minds are molded by the customs, the ethos of our place and time-of-life.  An expansive vocabulary, or even business acumen by no means “elevates” the mind from the rut followed by the “blue collar” Amazon delivery driver, or the park district employee emptying the refuse containers, making his/her rounds park to park…  Our differences of mind as Americans are minor.  Everyone of us is released from the same ancestor-made-mold of those who built New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and defrauded indigenous peoples of land, exiling them to backwater reservations.  Slavery and four years of Civil War are not to be forgotten.  All of that has “stamped” us, a residue resides in our mental/emotional DNA.

We Americans, pragmatists, self-anointed example of democracy, what do we want more than anything else?  Would anyone be foolish to disagree:  Security and nothing else but security!

• The government will never take away my guns!
• America is the best country in the world!  Everyone wants to be like us!
• Christianity is the ultimate, the absolute truth!  Everyone seeing differently ought to be “pressed” to believe in Jesus.  Of course there’s no middle ground.  Jesus or Satan!  Choose!
• Capitalism is the ultimate path to prosperity.  Never mind that infinite growth burns up the earth.  Nature is in death-throes by our “prosperity.”

Do not these principles structure your thinking and my thinking?  All are familiar. We believe we know them.  Do we?

Like Linus’ blanket, we’d be lost without them!

We simply must work our way out of our rut, drop our blanket!  It stinks, and is quite tattered.