When you think that YOUR intellectual curiosity exists in a vacuum devoid of any social responsibility, that you can ignore the motives of people coming to speak to you and treat the place simply as a “forum for robust debate” you are in effect treating the world and everyone in it simply as a playground, as one poster there put it, for your intellectual curiosity. A world where nothing else matters except YOU and whether YOU “develop” personally – and what kind of development? A world where the “debate” of “ideas” (in fact nothing so high minded, just networking opportunities and opportunities for people like Le Pen to persuade the up and coming bourgeoisie of other countries that they are “moderate” and “reasonable”) occurs independently of anything else and where nothing else matters except the members of that debating society themselves. A world where these ideas and the situations that produced them exist independently of any real world consequences and any struggle.