To the extent your criticism is directed toward people on this forum, I disagree. Anyone who argues strictly from authority gets swatted down pretty quickly here. People will readily criticize Mises’ utilitarianism, Rothbard’s natural rights theory, you name it. One particular poster here came off as far too doctrinaire a Rothbardian, and he got pounced on pretty heavily in debate.
I don’t think it’s fair at all to say people are parroting anything here. They are applying the philosophical and economic ideas they’ve gleaned from their reading to actual arguments in rigorous debate. You can’t do that without understanding what you’re saying for long, because eventually your debate opponent will expose you.
You ask how the great thinkers we revere got to where they did. Almost to a man, their first step was to READ those who came before them and apply their learning to their writing. I imagine you criticizing a young Mises for parroting Menger. Of course they went beyond that to make great original contributions, but do you expect every thinker on every forum to be a great originator? What convincing original contributions to the world of thought have you made?
This may not at all be true, but just perhaps you might be uncomfortable with “philosophical buzzwords” because you’re not familiar with them yourself. That would be no crime. I wasn’t too familiar with philosophical argot when I was 20. But if that is the case, I don’t think it’s fair to remedy the situation by asking us to discuss matters as if we haven’t read anything and we’re starting from a blank slate. Contrary to your characterization, that is the way most discourse is conducted on the internet. And the unmoored “theories” that result seem more capricious and silly than original and refreshing.
I think that’s a common stage many people go through. Frank Lloyd Wright said, “A highbrow is someone educated beyond his capacity.” That’s what I’d call having a weak mix, or to quote Bilbo Baggins, “like butter scraped over too much bread.” If you take in too many ideas but don’t think them through and make them your own by testing their implications to everything else you believe, it’s easy to end up parroting.
Here’s something I’ve discovered about life:
The process of coming to an understanding of X on your own will always lead to a much deeper understanding of X than you would have gotten if you had read a derivation or explanation of X in a book, or if someone had taught it to you.
Once you read (or someone teaches you) the derivation or explanation of X, you can never go through that “virgin” thought process on your own. You can’t blaze that path on your own, because someone has already blazed it for you. You can never get that very last level of intimate understanding imparted by a virgin, trailblazing thought process. It’s as if the existing framework of ideas gets in the way of the pure, sandbox-level idea creation process.
Therefore, except for very easy concepts, every concept you’re exposed to from outside is one more concept that you’ll never be able to understand as deeply or as thoroughly as you potentially could have (if you had derived it yourself).
Consequently, to learn about a concept from the outside is to forever deprive yourself of the potential to reach the deepest levels of understanding of that concept.
Simple examples are any life lessons you’ve learned, especially by thinking a lot when you were very lucid about the topic at hand. You can verify with your own experience that if, before you learned those life lessons though your own virgin thought process, someone had taught you them, you would never know them quite as well as you do now.
The other side of the coin is that deriving the whole of, say, anarcho-capitalism from scratch would be extremely difficult and time-consuming. But, just like we keep in mind that all laws are enforced by violence so we should be very careful about what laws we create, I think we should keep in mind that all exposure to new ideas forever removes some of the potential for depth of understanding of those particular points. In short, when we read new ideas we are trading the last measure of depth of potential understanding for efficiency of uptake - very often a necessary trade, but a tragedy of sorts nonetheless.
I interpret your sentiment as lamenting this “tragedy,” as do I. Some people the forums have read more than they’ve pondered, but overall I think the people here that read a lot have also pondered a whole lot, so there are relatively few egregious examples (but plenty of minor examples). In short, most people here essentially know what they’re talking about and have thought their positions through quite a bit. The ones that haven’t, and the ones that can’t admit when a topic is out of their ken are pretty obvious, but I doubt they will realize their error until they do so in the silence of their own room, so to speak.