There Is No Sense in Common Sense

2021-06-07 · essays

People consider alcohol to be wrong and unacceptable, yet cigarettes or junk food are completely fine. All of them are equally devastating, but one of them is deemed to be faulty by society’s standards, and the others are not.

Why? Applying the same logic would make all of them prohibited. It makes no ‘sense.’ From this, we conclude that there is no sense in common sense. Now, the word ‘common’ means that there is some kind of feature that should be shared by all people. However, you find tons of examples every day where people are told: “How do you not know this? This is purely common sense!” If it was indeed so, why there exist tons of people who get told this every day. Should the common be, absolutely, common?

Every day and every moment, I see people doing things that make no sense, yet they do this just to feel special. The feeling of superiority that one gains by believing that they are different than everyone else is incomparable. However, all of us cling to social norms and their so-called common sense.

All of this is just highly contradictory to an unbelievable extent. The real tragedy is that trusting our common sense leads us to make bad decisions rather than rational ones. Perhaps the most severe flaw in common sense is that it succumbs to the apparent limits of the individual perspective.

Alternatively, we can lack any real expertise in the field and depend solely on what we know to be right or might have been told to be genuine.