https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=5Q6Tg5zowWw
Hello, and welcome to Navigating Patterns. What I’d like to discuss today is the concept of common sense. What’s the definition here of common sense? As with all my videos, of course, these are my definitions. Feel free to use them. I think they’re great. I use them. If you don’t like them, check them out. Or modify them for your own use. When we’re talking about common sense, a lot of people seem to have a misunderstanding that they know what they’re talking about. And the case I’m going to try to lay out for you today is that you have no idea what common sense is. Not as a concept, but the thing you think is common sense is not common, at the very least. These are things that we take for granted. It’s stuff that we know embodied at a very deep level of ourselves. But we probably cannot actually articulate something that we feel is common sense. Which is why we say, that’s just common sense. In a way, we’re dismissing it. We’re devaluing the knowledge. We’re saying, everybody knows that. It’s common sense. And maybe everybody does know that. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe from your perspective, everybody knows exactly what that is in your sphere. And then you encounter somebody outside of your sphere and they have no idea. Maybe it’s something cultural. Maybe it’s something local to your neighborhood. Maybe it’s something you just grew up with that your whole family sort of embodied. And no one ever said it to you. No one ever talked about it. It’s just something that’s deep in there. This goes back to the concept that Jordan Peterson talks a lot about where your knowledge is embodied. It comes rising out from your body, out through your head, through your speech, in essence. And I think that’s most of your knowledge. So these are things that you’ve learned deeply from the bottom. And then when you encounter somebody who doesn’t know it, you’re like, you don’t know what to do. It’s so obvious to you that you just can’t conceive of A, anybody not knowing it, and B, how to explain it. Because why would you ever need to explain this? That seems to be how people are engaging with this concept when they invoke the term common sense. So again, these things are common, but only to the people closest to us who learn the same thing around the same time. And we don’t really realize that because we don’t know any different until we run into somebody who doesn’t have that understanding. And all of a sudden, that’s different. So what makes this important? Like, why is it important to realize what we’re invoking when we speak about common sense? Well, I think for me, it shakes our belief in a shared set of knowledge that we can reliably agree on with other people. It puts us in a position where we don’t really trust that other people have the same understanding that we have of something very basic and fundamental to us. And at the same time, our sense of objective reality or objective truth gets rattled around. And a lot of people rely on objective reality or objective truth, right? This is something like relying on the opposite of faith. And that’s probably too deep a topic to go into here. But appeals to objective reality and objective truth happen fairly often. And we fall into them all the time. And that can be a dangerous thing. One of the aspects is that we’ve been faced with a situation when we invoke common sense that we don’t know how to communicate this effectively. Or we fail to do so when we could have. So now we’ve caught ourselves in a bad assumption. Now it’s bubbled up somehow. We’ve noticed it or maybe it was pivotal in some relationship. And now we’re sort of in a position where it’s like, oh, no, you know, there’s a thing here that I don’t I thought I understood it, but I don’t know how to I don’t understand it well enough to tell somebody else about it. And we need to have grace for ourselves in that situation. And of course, we need to have grace for the other people, you know, that don’t have that common sense, that sense that isn’t common. It turns out we thought it was common. It’s not common. Because they have a different way of navigating the world, a different way of sense making, a different way of understanding, a different pattern, perhaps, that they see around that similar issue. And again, a lot of that stuff is stuff you grew up with. And so you’re sort of understanding like, whoa, there’s things I know that I don’t know how I know them. That can be pretty scary. And so we want to sweep that under the rug and say, it’s just common sense. It’s the other person’s fault. They don’t have common sense. What’s wrong with them? Right. And really, we’re putting ourselves above. Right. We’re saying, ah, I’ve got this. They don’t have this. Therefore, always a dangerous thing to do. That’s why you need to insert a lot of grace. And the problem with common sense is our reliance on it. Right. We have a deep reliance on a lot of pieces of knowledge that limit our perspective, which is not to say that all things that are, quote, common sense are wrong or bad or limiting. But some of them might be or the fact that we can’t articulate them might limit our perspective. In other words, if there’s something you know that you take for granted that you know deeply, you may never have circumambulated that. You may never have worked around it. You may never have struggled with it enough to adopt it correctly or understand the nuance or maybe appreciate how useful it really is. Right. Or how good a piece of knowledge it is. There are lots of examples of this. I’ve heard people before invoke. Well, if somebody tells you they’re going to give you two dollars for your dollar, it’s common sense that they’re ripping you off. Is it? Some people are very trusting and they they don’t know any better. It seems logical and rational and reasonable, but actually it’s not like you have to assume that somebody’s a bad faith actor, that they don’t like you, that they’re actively out to hurt you to not give you the two dollars for the one dollar like they said they would. Like you’d have to assume that somebody’s a liar. And some people aren’t capable of that. Honestly, some people just you know, you’ve seen them there. We call them naive. Right. They just believe what they’re told. There are people like that to them. The fact that no one’s going to give you two dollars for your dollar. Maybe maybe that’s not true, but maybe it seems true to you. It never occurred to them, never occurred to them. Why? Because nobody would ever hurt them. Right. They’ve never been in that world. So that’s one example of like a common sense thing. But it really limits our perspective to understand that we grew up understanding a certain level of trust around offers. Right. Oh, when somebody offers something too good to be true, be careful of it. Oh, that’s sort of a nice little common sense nugget, isn’t it? We may have learned that without ever hearing those words spoken ever or anything like them. We may have learned that through watching, watching our family, watching our friends, watching around the neighborhood, having been involved in transactions and gotten burned. So then we know that. But we’ve never talked about it. We never had to. Everybody knew everybody else was there. But Ben, as you go out in the wider world, as you get older, as you interact with people who didn’t grow up where you grew up, didn’t grow up in the neighborhoods you grew up in, didn’t grow up in your family. They have a different understanding of these things. Totally different in some cases. It’s really shocking. And that’s really what it is. It’s shocking to us. And that’s why we sweep it under the rug by saying, oh, it’s common sense. What’s the matter with you? There’s nothing wrong with me. I totally understand that. And that helps us to realize something about ourselves, that we’re not as smart as we think we are. Right. We’re not as clever as we think we are. We’re not as articulate as we think we are. We’re not as understood as we think we are. And that separates us. And that’s why we need more grace. Right. We need to extend ourselves and others more grace and say, oh, we may think that’s common, but maybe it was a gift given to me that this other person didn’t get. And wow. And then what if I’m not articulate enough? What if I don’t understand what I’m on about well enough to give that gift to them or to anyone else? Oh, that’s that’s heavy. That’s heavy. So we need to be careful that we don’t denigrate people just for not understanding something that’s common sense. I’m not saying don’t use common sense. I invoke common sense all the time. Right. I just try to be careful about, oh, why did I say that? Is that true? Is this a common thing? Because maybe it’s not common or under what conditions isn’t this sense making common? I don’t know. It’s a good question. When when when are the things we think of as common sense not common or when are they not sensible? Because there are some things that aren’t sensible. Things change sense based on context. And I know in a previous video, I talked about words and their meaning and the meaning of the word comes from the context. Doesn’t come from the definition. The definition is required, but that’s insufficient. Necessary, but insufficient. And the context alone can change the meaning behind the words you’re using. And it’s not just context in the sentence. It could be context in the paragraph or context with the tone. It’s the same with common sense. If you’ve lived in a world where everyone’s been nice to you and people just give you things, you know, maybe you’re particularly attractive or particularly attentive to them or you’re particularly likeable because you smile a lot. And they’re willing to give you two dollars for a dollar. People are like that. I’ve seen it. Most people are like that. And maybe under certain contexts, people will do that all day long. Like maybe if you’re hanging out with church people all day, they’ll they’ll happily do that for you. Some people pay the tolls for the person behind them. I saw that the first time I thought it was crazy. People did it for me. I got angry. I was like, what’s going on? I used to live in Boston, so we’re very suspicious in Boston. Yeah, like, what does that person want? Why are they doing this for me? They don’t even know me. Do I know them? Maybe I know them. Maybe it’s a trick. Who knows? You can get very paranoid about these things. But to somebody who, you know, has a religious belief that may just be, you know, I’m just being a good Samaritan, right? For a stranger, which, you know, for them is the is the highest form of of worship of fellow man. You know, I don’t know. I don’t want to speak on their behalf. But it’s interesting that you can interpret the same behavior differently. And it is that context that gives us the idea that it makes sense. Right. And so. When we invoke common sense, it’s both the commonality and the sense there in question. This is what we’re hiding. This is what we’re covering up. This is why the definition of common sense is important. Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t things that aren’t common sense or that there couldn’t be things that could be common sense. I’m not saying that at all. All I’m saying is that usually when we invoke it, we don’t know what we’re talking about. And that’s a way into learning more about ourselves, learning more about the people around us and getting a better understanding of the world around us and seeing those patterns within ourselves and outside. That we can navigate successfully. On our way to a better world, on our journey through life. I hope you found this helpful. Hopefully you can wrestle with this idea and maybe point it out to others. And maybe. Maybe in doing that, you get a better sense for yourself and a better sense of the differences in others and how to approach them with with grace. And in a way that helps you and them to connect more completely and to find common ground, to find common ways of making sense, to find things that you can connect with, participate in and co-create together. Thank you for your time and attention.