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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/11/10/the-health-effects-of-a-nuclear-test-can-last-decades/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.5119605049df
Exposure to nuclear radiation during months three and four of pregnancy was associated with reduced educational attainment, high school completion, and adult earnings. Such exposures were also associated with reduced IQ scores among boys at 18 years of age. A one standard deviation increase in ground exposure reduced high school completion by about 1 percentage-point among men, and by about 2 percentage points among women.
The problem with “Common Sense” is, that it isn’t too common...
Many people are narcissistic, I can do whatever I want to do whenever I want to do it and you can’t tell me different. They have no shame, no guilt, a huge sense of self importance and entitlement. I firmly believed that with Obama’s presidency much of this behavior began and was even encouraged, (given his war on police, America, rule of law, etc.) Myself, I can’t even picture myself acting that way. It seems much more work to act like an ass all the time, put yourself in harms way, make a spectacle of yourself. Anytime I encounter one of these special people I do give them a “judgemental” look though.
Liberalism is ruining our culture.
What we call "common sense" has to be taught. It may be common but it isn't automatic.
Why? Because liberalism defies common sense and liberals are too lazy to do something else.
The Socratic dialectic is a distant, if not extinct (as a practical matter), practice.
Sounds very familiar. A lesson on how to start the pressure washer engine resulted in a broken starter rope, getting the extension cord on the saw resulted in the saw being drug out of the shop with the extension cord on it!
I taught 20 somethings in an industrial setting. I really don’t mean to belittle, I’m just reporting the facts, you can’t possibly over estimate how little they know or just how far back in the basics you have to go. I once imagined stories about not being able to change a tire were stretching the truth. Not now!
It is a precarious thing indeed.
The dad is a less a friend than acquaintance. I don’t count many real friends.
There is indeed a plan but I have already learned it it far to ambitious!
It may be common to us but it is a complete unknown to many it seems.
I have a good acquaintance that is a rancher. He and his son work like sled dogs from early in the morning until late. He came by today and we got into a short conversation about the things we discuss here. I told him that people like he and his son are as scarce as unicorns.
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