War Is Commonsense
Commonsense is valued highly in our society. Find a successful business person and you will find a person with a great deal of commonsense. People with commonsense rise to all sorts of high and respected positions. They become insurance agents, factory foremen, politicians, investment fund managers, bank presidents, military officers, or any of the other many occupations that require a quick grasp of the obvious, whereby obvious I mean simple facts like the fact that you can make a lot of money by moving money around, and the fact that you can gain the confidence of those above you by doing their bidding, or the fact that a willingness to kill large numbers of human beings is advantageous to the wealthy and powerful, and consequently, calls for rewards of position and honors.
Commonsense is that sense that makes people like "Anna" (the snitch that framed Eric McDavid) automatically and quickly conclude that the pilots of the jets that flew into the World Trade Center must be Muslim. Commonsense is what leaders bet on when they stage a terror attack with the design of provoking yet another war, knowing people like your next door neighbor will make the same inference. Commonsense is what tells you that your president would not lie to create a war, that your Central Intelligence Agency only lies to foreign audiences, that torture extracts the truth from random persons plucked off of the streets of the Middle East, that there is absolutely no way all of the news outlets would lie about the same thing at the same time, and that every war that is fought, no matter the circumstances or history of that war, is fought for our freedom.
For millions of years commonsense told humans that women are only good for breeding, that evil spirits made us sneeze, that the gods punish entire communities for not sucking up to them enough and in the way they prefer to be sucked up to, that sickness is a punishment for misdeeds in the current or a former life, that the world is flat, and that people from other tribes live lives of lessor value than our own. For thousands of years commonsense told humans that the world was created for the benefit of humanity alone, that there were only four elements, that a woman having her period is unclean, that those of different belief systems from our own are damned to eternal damnation, that women are the source of original sin, that some people are meant to be slaves to other people, that God commands Kings and Queens to command us, that mental illness is the manifestation of satanic possession, that lead can be changed into gold, that the Earth is the center of the universe, that homosexuality is a mental illness, that animals exist only for our use, that miscarriages are a manifestation of God's disapproval of the parents, that the local Lord should be able to screw any woman or her wedding night before her husband makes love to her, that satanic women flew through the night on broomsticks, that witches float and saints sink, and that if you sailed far enough across the ocean, you'd fall off the Earth's edge.
For hundreds of years commonsense told us that the shape of a person's head detailed her abilities and talents, that dark skinned people are inferior to white skinned people, that Jews are the cause of our economic problems, that bathing causes sickness, that flies are generated by rotting meat, that women are incapable of reason, that leeches can suck the poison out of a sick person's body, that it is a sign of taste to bind books with human skin, that Irishmen are inferior to Englishmen, that every woman pines to be a bride, that it's a woman's fault if she gets raped, that the best way to learn anything is to repeat it over and over, and that moving faster than 30 mph is fatal.<\p>
You can see why commonsense is a trait needed to be successful in the things our society values: the accumulation of wealth through exploitation, the raping of the environment, the waging of war on those who have resources we want, the brainwashing of the masses into compliance.
What the world needs is not commonsense, but uncommon sense: the sense to think independently, the sense to realize that the worst of us hide behind commonsense, obfuscating their evil intent and actions under the cover of commonsense's attraction. Commonsense tells us that no one would go to war as a means of taking the wealth from the working class and giving it to the corporate owner class. Commonsense tells us that no one would use a war as a pretense to award lucrative contracts to their cronies (and for no other reason). Commonsense tells us these things, but commonsense is wrong. Commonsense is the inertia of collective human stupidity. (The stupidest man I ever met strives to create the world's greatest repository of commonsense, spending millions in your tax dollars to do so. He might as well be seeking to create the world's biggest garbage can.)
Let's turn our backs on commonsense. It got us to where we are, and that itself is proof enough that it just doesn't work.
Re: War Is Commonsense but science required.
An excellent essay.
(except ,may I say . it omitted the natural belief that money is self expanding value that is expected to and does grow interest in banks)
However, common sense (often called pragmatism )is indeed the ideal form of knowledge in capitalism .
Celebrated since the then revolutionary idea to reorganise society in its name was put forward by Thomas Paine in his pamphlet “common sense”
Now indeed with capitalism dominant ,” Commonsense is valued highly in our society.”
However…
Some of that common sense examples you laugh at one-sidedly are simply the not so scientific knowledge accumulated by earlier society ,but that common sense ignorance functioned alongside perfectly practical accumulated common sense practices that worked well enough.
Its eay to feel and write superior things about lesser knowledge in olden times.
But the fact is your ability to read and write is only possible because of the development of slave societies on which civilisation city life grew and priestly or ruling class scribes could be fed and develop writing and even philosophise eventually about the values of common sense.
But your modern knowledge is not individual common sense but simply the collected social knowledge including methods of thinking and work (like the laws of logic)gained from the social activity of humanity earning their livings over generations,
But all you see- in your now socialy possible- educated individualist superiority- is
‘collective human stupidity”
Not up to your own superior thinking ability?
“What the world needs is not commonsense, but uncommon sense: the sense to think independently, the sense to realize that the worst of us hide behind commonsense,”To replace that with your paricular commonsence ,More more of the same?
" Commonsense tells us that no one would use a war as a pretense to award lucrative contracts to their cronies
What is this except a claim that an individualist common sense of individual reasoning is superior to that of ordinary social mortals. Should we look for a hero leader who is good at that individual common sense reasoning ?
No, my friend ,what we need is the better development and application of humanities science applied for the social interest , including for a better human environment free from the capitalist “common sense “ideas of the individual exploiting profits from the labour of our fellow humans.
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