Common Sense
This website is based on the premise that using common sense, enables a person to perceive the difference between facts and truth and falsehoods.
However, “a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of right…” Apparently “time makes more converts than reason”. 1
No society can police everything all the time, least of all a democratic society. A healthy society rests on a consensus about what is a deviation and what is normal… Society renews itself as common sense evolves. This requires trustworthy, transparent, respectful institutions of social discourse, especially when we disagree… Social media is not a public square but a private one governed by machine operations and their economic imperatives, incapable of, and uninterested in, distinguishing truth from lies or renewal from destruction. 2
“The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas… The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” 3
My concern is whether my belief in common sense is already outdated and too late, and do we have enough time to save common sense and our democracy.
- “Common Sense”; Thomas Paine, 1776; Prometheus Books 1995.
- “The Coup We Are Not Talking About”, Shoshana Zuboff, [A version of this article appears in print on 31, 2021, Section SR, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: The Knowledge Coup.]
- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1919 dissenting opinion in Abrams v. United States