Common-Sense: Missing in Action?
A rescue plan
October 4, 2025 (Ten-Four)
Common-sense, composed of etiquette, ethics, instinct, learning, and shared expectations, guides us through encounters with friends, strangers, work associates, and others. Though surprisingly complicated, it doesn’t feel scripted. It feels natural. We just know to wait our turn, protect children, not harm others, give everyone a fair shake, stay healthy, do our jobs, have fun, and so navigate peacably through myriad different situations. Those who have tried to write rules for such encounters find that there are always exceptions, and the exceptions always have exceptions, so it’s awfully difficult to codify. It’s like riding a bicycle, complicated to describe, but easy to do once you learn.
Scaling-up natural-born common-sense to the larger society turns out to be exponentially more complicated than in small groups. When it works, it does so through a sort of fractal replication of small-group dynamics. The people and groups we care most about filter and diffuse personal choices throughout the larger society. Consumer purchase decisions and voting have been studied the most, because that’s what those who pay for the studies are most interested in. While this might seem a rather limited sphere of human experience, from the empyrean of philosophy comes confirmation that it is the ‘genealogy of morals’. Friedrich Nietzsche, an unlikely source, located the origins of common-sense in commercial relations:
‘The feeling of ‘ought’, of personal obligation has had its origin in the oldest and most original personal relationship that there is, the relationship between buyer and seller, creditor and ower.... Making prices, assessing values, thinking out equivalents, exchanging -— all this preoccupied the primal thoughts of man to such an extent that in a certain sense it constituted thinking itself.’ [p 80]
Divine Right transferred from kings to people. The American Founders, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, transcribed then-extant common-sense on human relations and governance. They did not invent free society, they merely sketched how it would be without kings, by investing the ‘divine right’ of governance in some (though not all) of their fellow-humans. They didn’t pretend they were granting favors to the citizenry. Having overthrown a king, Americans understood intuitively that the restraints embodied in freedom of speech, assembly, religion, enterprise, and the guarantees of due process, made social peace possible, and thereby prosperity.
In American tradition, these choices derive their validity from friends, family, ethnic associations, schools, work associates, unions, voluntary organizations, sports buddies, churches, 4-H clubs, and so on. America, as Tocqueville observed in the 19th century, was extraordinarily rich in these social resources. But scaling-up common-sense can suffer setbacks, as restraints on what the state could do to the citizenry were gradually sloughed off in the 20th century, under a variety of pretexts. War, central banking, national security, terror attacks, financial crisis, health emergencies, digital/crypto currency — all led to the same end, centralization of state control at accelerating speed. An ethos of expertise imposing whatever is technically possible erased common-sense memories of why government must be restrained in the first place.
Transformation. One of the saddest spectacles of late-20th-century America has been the systematic subordination of those vibrant social resources to hostile cults, and the consequent atrophy of those resources. Common-sense, hijacked by ersatz associations, amplify rather than restrain anti-social tendencies. In their place, now (2025) personal choices are validated by a dystopian realm of influencers, hackers, mendacious fact-checkers, trolls, gamers, avatars, disrupters, cyber-spies, paid mobs, glory-seekers, and others. AI-generated prose adds another layer of unmoored content to the toxic mix. All of this co-exists with some very well-informed, thoughtful, and penetrating analyses (especially here on Substack), up-to-the-minute real-time accurate information, wide expansion of consumer choice, research in previously unreachable depth, a global range of freely available art, cultural, and scientific resources, and many other creative resources.
In a world where ideas and choices are vetted by a battery of friends and associates, the crazy ideas circulating today would have been stopped cold. With innate common-sense intact, it would be impossible to get billions of people to accept the insane proposal to inject them with an experimental gene-altering drug, or to harm themselves in the many other ways that have been devised for perverse delectation.
Unrestrained by common-sense, fundamental societal and mutual protection break down. Wars careen mindlessly toward nuclear holocaust, bio-weapons like the Wuhan virus coupled with another bio-weapon, mRNA injections, disguised as the antidote, an industry of mass migration built on sexual slavery of children, vaccine-driven neurological damage grotesquely ‘cured’ by genital mutilation, addictions to marijuana, fentanyl, opiods, amphetamines, cocaine, anti-depressants, and other products of the pharmaceutical laboratory, politically motivated murders and mass shootings prompted by these same drugs, and so, sickeningly, on, in the most vicious of circles imaginable.
Transforming youngsters into robotic remote-control killers would once have been ‘mission impossible’. But persons subjected to extreme psychological trauma, and deprived of the mutual obligations of normal relationships, develop split personalities wherein normal inhibitions and restraints are switched-off. A trauma-trained shooter may even forget what he has done, or leave telling clues to the crime, as a signature indicating pride of accomplishment.
Christian restraint. In the West (basically Europe and America plus the Anglosphere), Christianity once supplied what restraint there was to be had, with the significant exceptions of war and imperial conquest which it inspired. The system it replaced, however, made human sacrifice to propitiate the gods routine, regularly enslaved conquered tribes, and required such exact obedience to law that it was readily bent to serve a parasitic priesthood and anointed leaders. Jesus Christ took the sins of humanity upon himself to end human sacrifice, re-interpreted law as a moral code of mutual obligation, and offered his own life to inspire hope for peace. His followers converted ritual bloodshed into a harmless symbolic re-enactment. Within a millennium, the Christian priesthood obtained dominion over secular rulers, by threatening them convincingly with eternal damnation. Eventually they stretched belief in miracles to the breaking point, giving way to the rationalist mindset of the Enlightenment.
Despite its over-reaching, Christianity supplied many useful restraints that were not noticed until they were gone. Ideas that were novel two millennia ago restrain the urge to murder one another. Now human sacrifice is back, re-packaged as science, women’s choice, identity affirmation, genetic transformation, eldercare, organ harvesting, or planetary salvation, all of which are now valued higher than human life itself. And disturbingly large numbers of people believe it’s OK to murder those whom they disagree with. Law can hardly express a sense of mutual obligation in a society where that common-sense that gives rise to law has atrophied.
Awareness of influence. Something impelled me to take a physical book from the shelf, which included Malcolm Gladwell’s now-classic 1999 New Yorker article on Clairol’s huge success in driving hair-coloring from usage by seven percent of American women to 42 percent. Their perception of hair-coloring changed almost overnight from ‘trashy’ to ‘elegant’, propelled by the mystique of ‘Does She or Doesn’t She?’
As feminine aspirations changed from the Doris Day role model to a more self-assertive type, L’Oréal eventually drew even with Clairol on the back of ‘Because I’m Worth It’.
Then, women could change their identity with a five-dollar bottle of tinted shampoo, and feel thoroughly satisfied and confident about the result. The notion of rearranging their genitals would have been unimaginably abhorrent to them. Now, drastic alterations of physiology are promoted to both sexes with vastly ‘new and improved’ techniques of psychological pressure.
Modern techniques of mind control vastly outpace our ability to comprehend them, become aware of them, and neutralize them. Early efforts to connect consumer goods to deeply felt psychological needs, pioneered by Edward Bernays, seem primitive today. Now, armed with detailed personal information willingly or unwillingly surrendered by social media users, far more granular appeals precisely targeted to individual preferences can sway behavior and thought while short-circuiting awareness. Formal education apparently does not enhance awareness of this influence; more highly educated people may even be more susceptible to such mind control, if the contents of their education and their media exposure reinforce one another. The result is a society with masses of people from all strata of intelligence and class mesmerized into near-robotic states of acquiescence.
Common-sense persists among those who have opted-out of psychological conditioning and central control. In rural areas where social ties are strong, among independent-minded people, unafraid to say what they see instead of zombie-like doing as they’re told, in small businesses not tethered to government contracts, in alternate media, with people who believe in their own innate health and ability to sort through the morass of data to find truth, and in like-minded communities both online and off-line, perceptions of reality not drowned out by noise survive. These are precisely the groups under attack, first during the covid episode with state-sponsored riots, suppression of civil liberties, government-directed censorship, job losses, forced vaccinations, then continuing currently with unprecedented extensions of mass surveillance and central control systems. The bait is convenience. It is undeniably more convenient to identify oneself or pay with a swipe of the mobile phone than with paper documents or currency. The cost is incurred later, with personal data accumulated centrally, unlimited spying authorized (’By using this app, you hereby agree...’), and an unconscious mental shift toward automatic acceptance of the loss of privacy. By design, it becomes increasingly difficult to ‘just say no’. But that is precisely what we must do to keep our common-sense.
The insistent push for universality reveals its inherent weakness. If even one person refuses — an mRNA injection, a fake ‘scientific consensus’, a digital ID, whatever — the whole system of control acts as if threatened. Because it IS threatened, as any ideology or religion claiming universal applicability must be, by the slightest individual variation. Perhaps that is the secret virtue of common-sense — the quirks, eccentricities, and unexpected oddities of human nature, which can neither be predicted nor centrally controlled by any AI algorithm. Therein lies the best hope for common-sense able to withstand the extraordinary pressures imposed on it in these turbulent times.
Yes, common sense is no longer common, and hasn't been for a while.
In my opinion, common sense is one of many things that went out the door when our nation turned its back on God. Only a major revival will guarantee its return.