At least with respect to my own nation and culture, I can't be a tabula rasa. The ledgers, of experience and otherwise, mean that I need to maintain my cognizance of the nature of these places, the law schools, the research doctorate programs, the commercial world. I know a lot about the nature of these instruments of power in my own society. But at the same time, I don't bring that determination to my interactions with the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker in the towns, no matter how naive their beliefs about the larger world and its instruments of power. 'All things to all people' means that one is wise to the wicked, and truthful to the simple, wisdom being a species of truth, and vice versa. And as the lot of the democracy is cast with the numerical preponderance of the latter, this is important.
This is apparently the lot of honest people in this culture, with such a president, and with such a commercial climate. Time will decide the issue.
This isn't a novel aspect of American society -- reading some early Royce, I see that the two principles of making it in America at the time were energy, and 'playing the game.' So, the words are the same. But perhaps the nature of the game, and the game of the game, which is to say the spiritual condition of gamesmanship, have changed.