COMMON SENSE, CITIZENS' ASSEMBLIES

MODERATION, RADICALISM, THE MIDDLE ROAD AND CHANGE

"Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life."  Henri-Frédéric Amiel

 CITIZENS' ASSEMBLIES

Citizens' Assemblies are an international mechanism for increasing the input of the average citizen into government.  They have functioned well in many locations and aside from the most important problem of resolving difficult governing problems they serve to focus the attention of standing legislatures and the press. They provide the function of providing common sense which special interests have overridden.

The Concept of memes helps explain why we do things that do not show "common sense" 

Common sense is a most uncommon thing. Most people want to be comfortably in line with the thinking of the rest of their crowd. Common sense is uncommon because of this human need to surround ourselves with the comfortable thinking of our culture. Religions and other social groupings have shown a capacity to believe quite fantastic things that do not represent "common sense".

Much of this capacity to immerse ones self in support of unconscionable actions can be explained by the concept of of memes. Memes are at the very least a useful concept. 

Leon Felkins has captured the essence of memes in the two paragraphs cited below

"Meme is a catchall term used to represent any of the various beliefs, mores, prejudices, customs, fads, etc. that may exist in a person's mind and which tends to spread from person to person somewhat like a virus. While a meme could be a true fact, that certainly is not a requirement for its existence and the assumption is that people have not bothered to verify the veracity of the memes they may own."

You may want to take a look at Leon's exploration of common sense and memes at one of his sites http://www.magnolia.net/~leonf/common/comsense.html. 

The importance of the concepts of  "common sense" and "memes" is crucial to our evaluation of the issues of "Political Myths" we will address in the expanded Wiki.

 

 

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