Common sense is a crucial support of the rule of law. Without it, the rule of law is dead. The law then stands on air, ephemeral as gossamer and as malleable as Play-Doh.
Common sense is dead in America, slain by the psychopathic ruling class and progressive propagandists teaching America’s youth to pledge fealty to the state at all cost and teaching collectivist claptrap, pseudo history, feelings-based psychobabble and political correctness above reading, writing, arithmetic, history and language arts. Several generations of youths have now grown up devoid of common sense and with little useable knowledge, having had it washed from their minds by the noneducation system.
When people cannot exercise common sense, normalcy bias and cognitive dissonance take over and dominate their thought processes. Normalcy bias is a condition in which the mind is convinced that because something has not happened, then it cannot or will not happen. When faced with a crisis, a person suffering normalcy bias underestimates the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. He is rendered unable to function beyond the level of automaton.
Cognitive dissonance is a condition of confusion. If a person believes a “fact” long enough (whether that fact is the truth or not), he cannot ponder or contemplate information or a question that challenges the “fact.” Even when presented with information that is in obvious conflict with currently held beliefs, the person suffering from cognitive dissonance is unable to process the dissonance and so accepts it as a normal state, i.e. conventional wisdom.
The lack of common sense first came to affect the hoi polloi. This was by the design of the ruling class. It is easier to fool and subjugate an ignorant populace than an intelligent one. Tyrants and despots have for years used the ignorance of their subjects against them. Notable examples include the Catholic church’s ban on non-Latin Bible translations, prohibitions against teaching American slaves to read and write, and the Islamists’ current and long-held ban on education for females.
I have written before that government attracts psychopaths. And while they are present throughout government and are evident by their actions, it is unfair to state that the whole of the elected class, all government functionaries and people in authority are psychopaths or exhibit psychopathic behavior. Many are simply suffering from a lack of common sense, which creates normalcy bias, cognitive dissonance or confusion. However, because of their positions of authority and status as “leaders” and “decision makers,” they contribute to the lack of common sense suffered by the masses, for they spread it like a cancer.
The lack of common sense is now pervasive throughout government at all levels. Here are some examples:
- The Federal tax code is now about 70,000 pages long, contains 3.7 million words and is changed on average more than once per day. It is so confusing that 82 percent of Americans pay for help, and 60 percent of them hire a professional accountant or tax preparer. Taxpayers spend almost $28 billion per year to have their taxes prepared. Even the former head of the Internal Revenue Service, Douglas Shulman, hired a professional tax preparer. It is impossible to get a “correct” answer when calling the IRS for help, because you are likely to get as many different answers as the number of different agents you ask. This puts everyone in danger of becoming a “tax cheat” and subject to fines, penalties and imprisonment. The irony is that taxes are not necessary to fund the government. They were instituted as a control measure and a wealth-redistribution scheme.
- U.S. regulatory bodies — the alphabet-soup agencies charged, ostensibly, with ensuring Americans are protected from fraud and abuse — are corrupt, fascist systems that serve as a revolving door of cronyism between government, large corporations and lobbying organizations. What they actually ensure is almost monopolistic power for favored corporations, redistribution of wealth from the producers to the large corporations via corporate welfare and tax breaks, and favored status when contracts are doled out. Meanwhile, small businesses are regulated and taxed into destitution and forced to shutter their doors and windows.
- The U.S. government is in a perpetual state of war, and the enemy is defined only as a “terrorist.” But the definition of terrorist has become all-encompassing and ever-changing and applies to whomever the psychopathic elected class determines is a threat to their power, prestige or office. The threat of “terrorist attacks” is used to gin up fear and further oppress the people. Those threats evaporate as quickly as they appear. Yet they are not questioned. The reality is that terror attacks on American soil are most often created by the FBI, CIA or some NGO (non-government organization) working on behalf of the state. In addition to Afghanistan, the United States has assets attacking so-called terrorists in Pakistan, Syria and Yemen (that we know of) and has attacked them in Iraq, Iran and Philippines. Such a fear of “terror” has created a climate in which the government has decided that it can assassinate American citizens by drones without due process, and many people see nothing wrong with this.
- While the United States fights undeclared wars against al-Qaida in many countries, it is funding and assisting al-Qaida-linked terrorists in others. An example of this is the recent Libyan revolution and the current hostilities in Syria. With U.S. funds, NATO helped terrorists linked to al-Qaida defeat Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s military so that the terrorists could take power. The U.S. was running guns through the Benghazi consulate to al-Qaida-linked terrorists in Syria.
- The Barack Obama regime, with an assist from the neocon wing of the Republican Party, backed the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist organization in its rise to power in Egypt and Libya. In Egypt, the Obama-supported Muslim Brotherhood president was thrown from power by a military coup over his efforts to create an Islamist state and failure to crack down on its attacks on the country’s Coptic Christians.
- In schools, students are being treated like criminals for the “crimes” of biting their food into the shape of guns, cutting off one-fourth of a sheet of paper (a teacher thought it looked like a gun), wearing T-shirts with gun images and the 2nd Amendment printed on them, bringing small G.I. Joe guns to school and throwing temper tantrums. Zero tolerance policies — the ultimate in no-common-sense policies — have even led to children as young as 3 and 4 being charged with sexual harassment and having permanent marks on their school records.
- The Missouri chapter of the NAACP is calling for the Department of Justice to investigate an incident in which a rodeo clown donned an Obama mask and asked the crowd if they’d like to see Obama run down by a bull. In response to the incident, the Missouri State Fair will force all future clowns to undergo “sensitivity training” mind-alteration therapy for the thought crime of projecting harm on a likeness of the President.
These are just a few examples demonstrating that common sense has been thrown out the window, but the political class and the masses accept as normal. Any questioning of the status quo gets one labeled an extremist, a conspiracy theorist or a “wacko bird.”