How "Common Sense" Shapes Our Reality
We navigate our daily lives using a hidden map we rarely stop to examine: common sense. It is the "sixth sense" that organizes our perceptions into a meaningful reality, allowing us to operate on autopilot through what is known as practical consciousness. This gift lets us navigate social situations without relearning the rules every morning. It only becomes visible when someone breaks the script—like a speaker yelling at an audience, disrupting the expected decorum of a lecture.
The danger of common sense is that it feels like a natural law, like gravity, when in fact these social rules are human-made through a process called structuration. We build the walls of our social world and then treat them as if they were always there. This "taken-for-grantedness" is the ultimate tool of power. If you can convince people that the current way of the world is the only sensible way, you have achieved hegemony, or rule by consent, and don't need to use force.
The American Dream is a perfect example of this invisible structure. It tells us that success comes from hard work and playing by the rules, framing failure as a personal fault. This narrative conveniently hides the structural hurdles that make the playing field uneven, ignoring that many are "born on third base" with inheritances while others can't even find the ballpark. By making success an individual burden, the system protects itself from being questioned.
Power in a free society relies on the "engineering of consent." As early pioneers of public relations noted, the minds of the masses are molded by people we have never heard of. Today, six major corporations control nearly everything we read, watch, or listen to, their goal being to sell audiences to advertisers, not to inform. They set the boundaries of acceptable debate, creating a "news hole" that prioritizes horse-race politics over deep policy issues and fosters a silo effect where we only encounter reinforcing ideas.
This control of information leads to a "United States of Amnesia," where we are trained to forget inconvenient histories. The brutal U.S.-backed wars in Central America during the 1980s are largely erased from public memory, so we ignore that refugees fleeing to our borders are often escaping the wreckage of our own past foreign policies. Because these facts don't fit the "common sense" narrative of our national identity, they become literally unthinkable.
To maintain this status quo, society cultivates "responsible intellectuals" who articulate the consensus of the powerful, while those who ask too many questions are marginalized as "wild men in the wings." A good education often serves as a filter, teaching us which facts are "inconvenient" and which ideas "simply wouldn't do" to mention. We become our own censors, staying within the lines of the prevailing orthodoxy to remain respectable.
Breaking this cycle requires moving from practical consciousness to a critical, discursive one. We must realize that common sense is not a stable truth but a field of struggle—a "home and a prison" that can be remodeled. Radical change begins only when we develop a new common sense that allows us to see the world as it is, not as we are told it must be.
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