Beliefs are all of the same nature, I think, but the difference between the two sorts we're talking about is that they're of different orders. One is a belief about the best way to decide one's beliefs, and the others are simply beliefs about matters--that's all I mean.

I think it's something you get through living life as well as discussing...it's something you reach through being shown--by personal experience, others' experience, scientific experiments, literature, history, whatever it takes, whatever is capable of showing the consequences of a certain thing--enough that you might change your understanding and beliefs.

In the older descriptions of Enlightenment, it's also related (and I would agree) to not just taking someone else's word for it, and figuring things out for yourself:

"Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is the incapacity to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. Such tutelage is self-imposed if its cause is not lack of intelligence, but rather a lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another."
-Kant

"The floating of other men's opinions in our brains, makes us not one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true."
-Locke

And yeah, I agree that the Foreign Service doesn't necessitate giving up thinking (about big ideas or anything else, as far as i know).