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Common Sense

In scientific circles, there seem to be a tendency to abhor common sense. This is because it seems that common sense is attainable by common people only, is a way of common people, is not specifically scientific. Yet, science has to thank all its developments and progress to common sense, it is basic for ideation i.e. for science. From Lucretius, Galileo, Newton, Semmelweis, Fleming, etc. on, it is all common sense that did it. This common sense says the following. When a problem is mondial (planetary, Earth encompassing), its solution also is to be found in a mondial form. Everybody knows that when e. g. Germany would ban all traffic, all production, would close all factories, all crematoria, all blast furnaces, would forbid all use of wood, all trade and transport of wood, would enforce all material to be re-circulated, all implements to be repaired instead of bought anew, use all available space from Autobahn to parking lots for re-forestation, etc., etc. it would not alter a iota to our predicament. It might make us survive a week longer, it would mean death all the same. Why? Naturally, because it is only a very, very small operation in so large a field, it is totally insignificant, it is not a mondial measure but a national one, local. Air, water, climate, minerals, animals and seeds, know of no frontiers, no customhouses, no barriers by fences. Germany, nay any nation, could not hope to survive, whatever severe measures they take (for themselves). Helmut Kohl once said plainly that there is no such thing as a national environment protection possible. He was heard to argue that we can shut down our power stations, but the risks remain because of such stations right across the border. Nuclear power stations are absurdities that kill imperceptibly. When the demand for KWh's is growing out of hand, we should realize that KWh's are always expressible in per head figures, i.e. the first and natural solution that springs into mind is reducing the number of heads, the capita. When any diplomat or else, (as Kohl did) then proceed to talk about the need for international agreements, an uncontrollable Homeric laughter should burst lose. It is just too comical (but heard everywhere). Agreements, whether national or intra-familiar, are known to be unworkable from far before Homer (the Argonauts) onwards till this very day. The second common sense manipulation may fool us: if we have to do it on a mondial scale, a planetary scale, why, we have a United Nations don't we? No way! United Nations means literally that the nations remain as such, like in internationalism. In practice, it is far worse. It only changes intra-national (intra-country or intra-religious) into inter-national COMPETITION and that means in its turn, a survival of greed (economics) and an unbridled destruction of Earth. It means, in fact, an enlargement in scale of papers, agreements, resolutions, that everybody seek to circumvent at the earliest possible moment (36). The very Iliad starts with the conflict of a broken agreement within a 'union' of Achaeans, and, 3000 years of (war) history shows that agreements still do not work. Agreements mean at least two clods, two or more clusters, they keep only as long as war is less profitable. Merging the clods however, make agreements impossible, meaningless, and war too. We don't want united by agreements, but we need integration, a total absence of clods, clusters, agreements or resolutions. Common sense says: 'let there be no nations, they are nonnatural groupings' (37). No hargle bargle, no barter between groups, but the fundamental rights and duties of every citizen of Earth alike in its place. These rights imply survival for all, these duties imply co-operation for survival by all (also meaning you, me, your children, etc.). Common sense now, can be with regard to two wholly different purposes. It can be used with regard to the individual only, in which case it is practically always disadvantageous to others (seeing that the desires of each clash), and it can be used from the express point of view of the others, of the whole, of society (when we are all in the same boat). Unfortunately, mankind has become inferior in this respect to the animals that live in herds, packs, colonies and the like. His drive for all behaviour is centered on the huge paradox of applause, he wants to be the best (i.e. different) but also the same as the other members of the flock. If he uses common sense at all, he uses it only for himself. It is therefore, that he behaves as a stray ling in a herd of stray lings, a situation that is unthinkable in animal nature. Common sense is not so much absent everywhere, it is only misdirected everywhere. This paradox of wanting to control yet wanting to be controlled, of being different and being the same, pervades all society up to the tiniest detail. As Wyndham shows it for the mother (parents) :
By a dichotomy familiar to us all, a woman requires her own baby to be perfectly normal, and at the same time superior to all other babies. Chocky.

next up previous
Next: Man's Stupidity Up: The World Solution for Previous: Catastrophe
Ven 2007-09-11