In my experience, and with very few honorable exceptions, economists are extremely difficult to reason with as soon as one starts questioning the logical and empirical soundness of some basic concepts in modern economics, or pointing out seemingly bizarre and illogical things found in the mainstream economic literature.

I'm sure this wasn't your intent, but this comes across to me like a situation where you've been having a high-level conversation about economics and then switch to asking the conomist to explain or justify the basic premises of the field to you. While the idea that you need to be convinced of the truth of the basics before productively discussing the complexities is sound, I'm less hasty to assume that the economists' refusal is due to a disregard for rationality. They just may be less interested in teaching you lower-level concepts of the field than they were in having the high-level conversation about it. If that were the case, the mismatch would be social, not rational.

I certainly don't know that the above is what actually happened, but it fits my model of human behavior better than your explanation does.