Posted on 06/19/2018 6:48:04 PM PDT by huckfillary
As I watched a woman walking on the narrow shoulder of a busy highway with triplets in a stroller, looking annoyed that she has to deal with all this danger and traffic, I asked myself once again, “Whatever happened to common sense?”
Then the question we never ask occurred to me: “WHY has common sense died?”
In order to answer it, you first have to ask yourself: What IS common sense?
Common sense is basically the application of simple reasoning to everyday life.
Common sense is not enough for a complex area of specialization. You can’t use common sense to do brain surgery, build a rocket, cure an illness or create a microchip.
But in everyday life, we all need common sense. And fewer and fewer of us seem to use it.
There’s probably no one answer here. The closest answer I know of is the decline of reason. You can look at how many families or couples interact, or how our political and social discourse now occurs, and see that reason has mostly gone by the wayside. Business transactions are usually more rational, but not what they used to be or could be, most agree.
It’s tempting to blame the death of common sense on today’s smart phones, which are really computers. Everybody is spending most of their time looking at these pocket computers instead of utilizing their reasoning.
However, common sense has been in decline for much longer than the era of smart phones. The first iPhone went on sale about 2007. But back in 1994, Philip K. Howard wrote a national bestseller entitled, “The Death of Common Sense.” The book resonated with millions. So the issue predates smart phones.
Reason’s decline is a slow, tortured and highly incremental thing. It’s not so much that people consciously reject reason as they gradually replace reason with something else. What’s the “something else”? The only alternative to reason is unreasoned emotion. Feelings — divorced from reason.
There’s nothing inherently wrong or bad about feelings. As a psychotherapist, I’m the first one to acknowledge that. But just as it’s wrong to reject feelings, it’s equally wrong to use feelings as your primary or sole tool of knowing what’s true. Today, more and more people do that. Hence the dawning of the age of The Snowflake.
A rational person feels things. But before blurting out his feelings, or accepting a feeling as automatically valid and true, a rational person stops to think and consider. It’s the stopping, thinking and considering that’s so lacking today. And while smart phones/social media have arguably made the problem worse, the problem existed well before smart phones and social media.
Consider the woman walking with her triple baby carriage in the middle of traffic. It sounds crazy, but I see it ALL the time. I live in a summer resort, and people pile into the town June through August. Most of them are well educated and many are significantly well off. They should be among the best and brightest. But you can see the look of angry frustration on the faces of these people who are resentful that cars, on a busy highway, are preventing them from taking a stroll, or getting to the beach.
It’s a metaphor for so many other things.
If their expressions could talk I think they’d say something like: “I should not HAVE to be dealing with this. How DARE these people be in my way.”
It’s a sense of unearned entitlement. And that’s what fuels the death of common sense.
The substitution of unreasoned emotion for what should have been rational thinking is the underlying issue. But what adds fuel to the fire is a sense of UNEARNED entitlement.
Basically, unearned entitlement tells us, “If I feel something, then it should be true — and treated by others as true.” And that’s what’s behind these people refusing to exercise their common sense. “I shouldn’t have to think about it. It should just be taken care of.” How? Somehow. By whom? Someone who’s able to do it.
If you want to understand why things have gone so wrong in a society with so little excuse for it to have happened — this is it!
The solution? More rational thinking. Reason and self-responsibility are the antidotes to emotionalism and entitlement.
It should be happening in schools, but it’s not. It should be happening in most families. But more and more young people emerge from their families (and schools) with the emotionalism and false entitlement that are toxic and fatal to reason.
It’s a cultural problem that starts as an individual problem — not with all but, regrettably, with most.
We can’t go on like this. Maybe articles and ideas like this one will have more of an impact once the crisis grows to a point where people know we’ve got to do something different.
At times, I think that’s starting to happen. Before long, we’ll know for sure.
I don’t need common sense. No matter how stupid I am, no matter what sort of idiotic shenanigans I get up to, if anything bad happens to me - anything at all - I can find a lawyer in the yellow pages or on TV, and get set up for life at someone else’s expense.
Common sense does because the Left made it a de facto crime.
Common sense was killed because it conflicts with leftist dogmas.
I hate autocorrect.
Common sense died because the Left made it a de facto crime. Also, like the author stated, entitlement helped kill it too.
People feel they are entitled to be safe at all times. People feel that they are entitled to never have anything bad happen to them. If reality smacks them down then they must blame someone else so they can be made whole. It doesn’t matter if who they blame is really guilty.
“If you want common sense, you need a family structure with a man at the head.”
I read a very interesting book by Ann Douglas entitled “The Feminization of American Culture” . Although Douglas is a feminist college professor, she was right on the money when she describes ,and regrets, the loss of the masculine in our society. Starting in the Victorian era of industrialization, women began to feminize religion which had once had a soaring virility to it. The Calvinism of the 18th century was rational and logical fueling a Revolution, but the evangelicalism of the 19th had overtones of romance and gentle piety surrounding it. It was then that women influenced the social norms that sprung at the time from the church. So we have been subject to emotionalism for a very long time . We also have settled for decades for a public square of badly educated and impulsive liberals who now hold court if not in Washington then in every other sphere of American life.
[[Why Did Common Sense Die ?]]
Because this is Satan’s Realm (for now) and as the bible prophesied- in the end times people will exchange the truth for lies- plain and simple- We’re watching prophecy unfold- Rapidly- and it all began in earnest when obama took office and set America on the road to becoming Sodom and Gomorrah- Before then- the left were at least coy abotu their intentions- hiding them- not being blatant abotu their intentions- once obama took the office though the left got very emboldened and no longer even bothered hiding their contempt for the truth and common sense-
That was when our country began exchanging truth for lies
It began with the rise of larger towns and cities.
In small communities everyone grew up seeing the proper ways to do things and behave. It was group learning.
In larger towns and cities even though you're around more people you're less likely to share the 'teaching of the group' so to speak.
People just don't SEE common sense around them anymore. 'The group' doesn't live it in their daily lives let alone teach it.
It's now the dumb leading the dumb.
And youtube.
Very interesting.
And now every inspirational story ends the same way . . . "just listen to your heart." (No, no, no! Think it through!)
It didn't.
If it were that bad, the Fat Ugly alcoholic Criminal Cow would be president.
Because it is no longer taught in school, many religious institutions, on college campuses, and at home.
Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?
Money quote: “I shouldn’t have to think about it.”
In context:
The substitution of unreasoned emotion for what should have been rational thinking is the underlying issue. But what adds fuel to the fire is a sense of UNEARNED entitlement.
Basically, unearned entitlement tells us, “If I feel something, then it should be true — and treated by others as true.” And that’s what’s behind these people refusing to exercise their common sense. “I shouldn’t have to think about it. It should just be taken care of.”
“I shouldn’t have to think about it.”
I'll give you two reasons. The first is "prosperity." Prosperity makes people stupid. People in stressful situations can't afford to be stupid. People in comfortable situations can.
The second answer is from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.
Emotion has taken its place. Logic is not seen as the priority decision maker. The Propaganda insists that people agree with their talking points or they will be publicly shamed. If logic were allowed to rule, the propaganda and political correctness the oligarchy pushes to control us would fail. Its hypocrisy would glow in the dark.
Feelings are nonsense
Emotions are nonsense
Compete utter nonsense
Logic and self preservation are the ONLY REAL VALUABLE TRAITS
” I did not think it would be possible to paint a fuel tank green and yet still have it come out looking like a patchwork quilt because the painter did not know enough to blend the brush strokes. It looks good from 100 feet away.”
I know exactly what you mean!
I tried to/hired several 16-18 yrs old kids to do simple things around my place. I don’t know if they are all stupid/on drugs/lazy or some combo of all three, but it is easier to do everything yourself than to hire todays young people.
You’d think that they would be able to follow instructions well enough to pick up the sticks in the yard, but you have to point out each one or they think the job is done after each one.
Cutting brush around the pond turned into just a day of destroying tools as fast as they were handed them.
Trimming a few bushes around the house was finished in less than an hour by cutting the electric cord twice, and finally nearly cutting off a finger with hedge trimmers. Not a single bush got trimmed!
bkmk
Common sense died when consequences died.
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