“The gay community made a heroine out of Judy Garland by ‘tearing’ or disfiguring her image of the all-American, all-gingham girl-next-door, and reworked her as a sign of the masquerade necessary to fit this image, a masquerade equivalent to that which, in the days before sexual liberation, permeated the whole of the social experience of gays.

Excorporation is the process by which the subordinate make their own culture out of the resources and commodities provided by the dominant system, and this is central to popular culture, for in an industrial society the only resources from which the subordinate can make their own subcultures are those provided by the system that subordinates them. There is no ‘authentic’ folk culture to provide an alternative, and so popular culture is necessarily the art of making do with what is available.”

–John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (1989)

When I was a kid, I thought adults over-emphasized experience to exercise power, even though they appeared to have learned little from it in actuality.

Given that I’m no longer nearly a kid, I think I was mostly right about that contention.

Experience is not nothing, but it’s mainly used (as I thought at the time) as a method of exerting power over those who don’t have that method of competing in the contest of ideas and action.

While some adults do use experience as a cognitive benefit, most just use it as yet another source of confirmation bias so it’s not a real factor in most decision-making processes in the real world.