Common sense is 235 years old. Common Sense, that is:
The 18th-century pamphlet by the Englishman Thomas Paine that
argued beautifully for independence from British rule in just 48
pages.
While this opus is still very much alive in classrooms,
websites, and C-Span Television screens across the nation, the
other “common sense” is very much dead.
Yup. Gone and buried is that silent little voice that
helped us make wise decisions and choices.
Why else do people resort to Chicken Soup for the
Soul products to find solutions in other people’s “been there
done that” serial stories of, say, “energy, endurance and
endorphins”? Or stories that inspire you to count your blessings,
or how to find silver linings. Mmmm mmmm good!
And why would Chicken soup devotees advertise this to the
world by buying the eponymously branded t-shirts, calendars… but
wait, there’s more!
Why do people consult Oprah Winfrey, a television chat
host, for what book to read… and not wonder why the very book soon
ends up in the New York Times’ best-seller
list?
Why do women — and Eddie Izzard? — throw out the
just-declared-awful pink color just because fashion magazines
magically deemed that, by God, red lipstick is now the
color?
Why else would we guzzle Gatorade, with chemicals unknown
to earth with “shades” of Lysol? Why not the proven well endowed
banana — with natural molecules, that is.
Why else do my friends now handsomely pay a home organizer
to tell them which personal possessions to keep and which to throw
out? Can you really not determine whether or not you should hang on
to your high school photos?
Why else do mothers-to-be buy dozens of baby magazines and
self-help books that prescribe so much advice they end up
conflicting themselves? Our mothers never had this and yet they
knew the essentials of bringing up baby without dropping it on its
head or wondering if there is a diaper that stimulates cognitive
development. Don’t laugh, undoubtedly instructions for both are in
some best-seller with chapters of their own.
And why else would mothers now wonder whether or not they
should become Tiger Moms? As opposed to helicopter or soccer moms?
Whatever. I just don’t know how I — and thousands of my birth-year
cohorts — were successfully raised by moms without a label. Gee,
this must make them heroes. Pardon the label.
And do we really need Dr. Oz telling us to eat cauliflower
and broccoli during the Super Bowl instead of potato chips? Do we
really need a doctor in every news channel touting his unique
“prescription” like a carnival barker? Don’t drink coffee, it
causes memory loss… Drink coffee, it’s good for your heart… Acai is
the new anti-oxidant, guaranteed fountain of youth… No, it’s bad
for you… Green tea is the new elixir.
And how about foundations to teach American kids to eat
right after school?
Why, why, why? I could go on and on.
THINK ABOUT IT. Everything has to be dictated by some
book, some gimmick, some product, some organization, or some expert
or celebrity whose knowledge is inversely proportional to his or
her fame. Some of Paine’s common sense to my rescue:
“the author of this production is wholly unnecessary
to the public.”
And just a reminder that with all this peddling comes the
proverbial answer to all your problems in the form of some
magical short-cut.
It’s all well and good to stimulate the economy with
publishing and manufacturing but the result is the American public
has been corralled like herds of cattle to a trough instead of
being allowed to, er, ruminate. To mentally chew the cuds, as it
were. Before swallowing the crud.
Sadly, the American consumer has lost his appetite for
independent thinking. A little bit of Paine here:
“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a
superficial appearance of being right.”
So why did thinking go to pasture?
Common sense tells me that this seeking of external advice
— this self-help culture — did not originate in Paine’s day not
least because American colonists were, ipso facto, the
self-reliant sort who thrived on using their thinker to seek
solutions.
Wikipedia dates self-help back as far as 700 B.C. with the
Greek poet Hesiod’s Works and Days dispensing agricultural
advice, just as Ben Franklin’s (who, coincidentally, was the one
who convinced Paine to go to America) farmer’s almanac Poor
Richard did about 1,000 years later.
But when did the Big Bang of self-help occur? According to
Wiki, it started in 1859 with the aptly titled book Self
Help instantly donning its author Samuel Smiles with fame and
fortune. Then came the still well-known 1936 blockbuster How to
Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Of course
we read it. But it wasn’t until the final third of the 20th century
that self-help really exploded. And at the beginning of the 21st
century, says Wiki, the self improvement industry — books,
seminars, coaches, and videos — rang in $2.48 billion per
year.
So with 152 years of this stuff behind us I’m obliged to
inflict some Paine: “Time makes more converts than
reason.” And with this, and thousands and thousands of
individual titles sold, I can’t help but observe that the
dummification of the American mind is in full swing.
Self help has morphed into self helpless.
As if self help books and such weren’t enough to aid and
abet the insidious disabling of the American mind, the emerging
market of the convenience industry in the 1950s was a big help: A
post-war steroidal pumping of the economy with hyper-production of
products and ads to induce visions of leisure in our head. Ladies
and gentlemen: the TV dinner is served. Indeed a handy time-saver
for working mothers but this sort of thing, with its concomitant
advertising, induces feelings that suppress common sense which
would otherwise question, say, the ingredients, for one.
Even TV trays popped up in 1952 to further coach us into
consuming more advertising for “tasteless” products we didn’t need
to, well, consume. Like the proverbial lemmings mindlessly heading
for cliffs, we dutifully propped them up in the living room for
expediency and, naturally, stopped engaging in dinner conversation
so healthy to family life.
Food that looks and smells of styrofoam shouldn’t be
touched. I don’t even need to go back 3.2 million years ago when
our ancient Australopethicene ancestor Lucy roamed the
Kenyan savannah. So here’s my rule of thumb: if Lucy didn’t eat it
then neither should you. If an ingredient on a label didn’t exist
— even 3.2 thousand years ago — it is likely a molecule
concocted by a PhD and not exactly good for human consumption. Our
little cells were simply not designed to metabolize Red Dye Number
whatever.
If the '50s homemaker really preferred to “cook” instead,
she could now open a box of Betty Crocker cake-mix…and just add
water. Making soup? Or spaghetti? Just open a can. Or add a can of
this to a can of that and, voilá, you have broccoli au
gratin.
Even laughter was canned. And since television producers
told us what is funny and when to laugh., even laughter lost its
independence.
As did our birthday and Christmas greetings. Hallmark came
along and left us with a loss for words.
And let’s not forget the labeling of human behavior and
traits as mental conditions with biological bases in the DSM, the
medical profession’s diagnostic manual of mental disorders. This,
says Dr. Christopher Lane in his book Shyness: How Normal
Behavior Became a Sickness, paved the way to
positioning the pharmaceutical industry to provide a pill for
“every alleged chemical imbalance or biological problem.” To wit,
the next edition of the DSM, he says, to be completed in 2012, “is
likely to establish new categories for apathy, compulsive buying,
Internet addiction, binge-eating and compulsive sexual behavior.”
Even road rage is already labeled under “intermittent explosive
disorder.”
Some necessary Paine here: “The wise, and the worthy, need
not the triumph of a pamphlet.”
IS THE AMERICAN populace so lame as to inspire Stanford
University School of Medicine researchers to devise
computer-generated phone calls to couch potatoes as an
“effective, low-cost way to encourage sedentary adults to
exercise”? I kid you not, this is an actual scientific
study.
Have we lost our minds entirely? We have surrendered
thinking in exchange for the path of least resistance that led to
instant fixes, from diet pills to “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books
and products providing life-improvement fixes for “fill in the
blank.” And in so doing we’ve become pawns on profit & loss
statements, aligning ourselves with the bottom lines of
companies.
Reminds me of another book. Coincidentally, one that
happened to co-celebrate Common Sense and America’s
bicentennial in 1976. That would be George
Orwell’s 1984 which eerily described a world in which an
oppressive ruling party — the proverbial Big Brother — controls
everything from language to behavior and watches people everywhere
they go via telescreens. And of course independent thinking and
individuality were simply
forbidden.
1984 might as well be 2011. With Big Brother Google
capturing the details of each and every mouse-click of our online
searches and the white lab-coats of neuroscience running PET Scans
on research subjects to help the suits of marketing and advertising
gain deep entry into our subconscious brain.
Ads today are now more insidious productions with abstract
messages serving as external cues that head straight for our limbic
system subsuming the brain’s use of its internal cognitive cues.
You know, those mental cues that naturally surface when it’s time
to make a decision.
Indeed, a Cornell University study showed that Americans
tend to use external cues to stop eating (running out of
beer, the TV show has ended) while the French use internal
cues (like no longer feeling hungry). They postulate that
over-reliance on external cues to stop eating a meal
may partly explain why one out of three Americans is
obese.
Makes common sense to me.
Like the bookshelves at Barnes & Nobles and Border’s,
the best-seller list is heavy with these books. If you are still
tempted to reach for one, just remember that the likes of
Dummies Guides or the Complete
Idiot’s Guides are calling you an idiot not because you don’t
know the subject therein but because you’re buying these very
books.
There’s even a book about self-help books! Its jacket
extols the book’s premise that self-help books are “like fairy
tales recasting stories and ideas into essays that people happily
read and then set aside when the new embodiment of the genre comes
along.”
My point exactly.
Sadly, our society has developed a co-dependency with
self-help. And as the original purveyor of common sense so wisely
noted:
It is an “invisible ‘government’ we need to declare
independence from.” A Paineful observation.
But here’s a paineless way of putting it. A short-cut, if
I may:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCsM35H9TFA
