Have We Lost Our Common Sense?

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

The only way to keep the status quo from imploding is to banish common-sense.

I was surprised to find that many people took my satire/parody last month seriously: Obama Administration Proposes 2,300-Page "New Constitution"(October 10, 2013). A number of people wrote me asking for the source of the story, and others chastized me for not labeling the essay "satire/parody," as so many others didn't seem to get the joke. (The permanent link was constitution-parody10-13.)

I thought the absurdity of hundreds of pages of the "New Constitution" being too secret for the public to read (i.e. redacted) would make the joke obvious, but I was wrong: apparently we are collectively ready to believe that an American administration would propose a law of the land that was too secret for the citizenry to read.

Even readers who suspected the post was satirical felt the need to confirm this was indeed the case. Other readers reported the essay had unleashed a torrent of vitriol on other sites' forums.

My first thought was that we may be losing our collective sense of humor. Readers of the zany satirical zine The Onion still appreciate that a good satire takes an element of truth and exaggerates it for humorous effect: for example, today's Onion headline Man Who Drinks 5 Diet Cokes Per Day Hoping Doctors Working On Cure For Whatever He’s Getting.

But as the gulf between the official state-cartel-Empire narrative ("everything is going great, but we will all die if Central Bankers don't run the world") and reality widens, people are losing their ability to separate satire from reality and truth from officially sanctioned fiction ("unemployment rate declines to 7%.")

The strains created by this cognitive dissonance (or perhaps more accurately, a double-bind that leads to alienation and a form of induced madness, as per psychiatrist R.D. Laing's extension of Gregory Bateson's concept) lead to short tempers, loss of perspective, emotional hair-trigger reactions and a host of other unhealthy responses.

The target of my mockery was not the Obama Administration per se but the nonsensical belief that a 1,300-page piece of legislation can possibly accomplish anything but strip us of the ability to actually solve critical problems.

Legislation running into the thousands of pages creates a complexity fortress that protects the state-cartel rentier arrangements that are stripmining our economy and society: sickcare, the financial sector, the defense industry, the national security state, Big Pharma, the educrat/Higher Education cartel, and so on.

The size and complexity of 1,000+ pages of legislation make it impossible for anyone but paid lobbyists and cartel shills to understand the bill's intricacies. The only institutions with the motivation and budget to pore over the thousands of pages are those who need to game the new laws to insure their fat skim of the national income continues to grow.

The citizenry are reduced to sheep led off for shearing–which is of course the whole idea behind 1,000+ page legislation. A 30-page bill might actually be read and understood as a rentier-skimming operation; so the "solution" for cartel-corporate lobbyists and the politico toadies, lackeys and apparatchiks is to embed this systemic predation into a 1,700-page bill that "we have to pass to find out what's in it."

(Nancy Pelosi, welcome to the Orwell Hall of Fame. You have raised the art to a new level.)

But on further reflection, I now think it's even worse than I first thought: we're losing our collective common-sense. Common-sense tells us 1,700-page bills cannot possibly do anything but serve those cartels and constituencies that the bill affects.

Common-sense tells us that a central state shrouded in secrets–not just secret agencies, but what amounts to secret laws and procedures–is incompatible with democracy and liberty.

Common-sense tells us that politicians and "leaders" who approve 1,700-page bills cannot possibly be anything but paid-for toadies, lackeys and apparatchiks.

Common-sense tells us that a stock market that rises over 10% in a few weeks is tracing a trajectory that history informs us is undeniably a bubble–yet our Central Bank (Federal Reserve) "leadership" insists history, fact and common-sense are all wrong: there is no bubble, in any asset class.

If the Fed started buying bat guano and the price subsequently shot up 1,000%, Janet Yellen would be obligated to insist that there was no bubble in the price of bat guano. Our political class of toadies, lackeys and apparatchiks would accept this assurance with a straight face out of fear that any emergence of common-sense might bring their entire edifice of propaganda, deceptions, cover-ups, official half-truths, juiced statistics and central bank manipulation crashing down around them.

The only way to keep the status quo from imploding is to banish common-sense.