"Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us." —Thomas Paine, "Common Sense"
"Common sense is the power of forming a good judgment and distinguishing the true from the false." —René Descartes, "Discourse on Method"
Rarely has the capacity to think independently been in such desperate scarcity as at the present time. The infamy involving the pandemic policies that national leaders and international authorities put in place and especially the medical denial of vaccine harms together provides convincing evidence of — among other things like widespread venality — a contagion of mental vacancy and traumatic ineptitude. To take the most recent example.
President-elect of the Canadian Medical Association Joss Reimer, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, has claimed that people who suffer from vaccine-related injuries do not exist? Notwithstanding, the Western Standard reports that “Ottawa as of January 2024 paid more than $11 million to families who suffered adverse reactions, including death, after taking a COVID-19 jab…and has budgeted $75 million more over the next five years.”
No matter. Reimer believes that people have been seduced by media pictures and stories. She claims that the vaccine-injured “weren’t real people” but only “look like real people,” and that we have been the victims of “Misinformation or disinformation.” One can only assume that she is either brain-dead or a paid prevaricator, gladly peddling fugazi.
An equally absurd canard was the pervasive meme known as the “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” The idea was nothing less than a propagandistic strategy devised by vested interests — coercive government, a regime media, a subsidized Academy, the WHO, Big Pharma — to enforce compliance among a fearful and easily stupefied population. After all, if people were vaccinated, they should have been safe from infection presumably owing to the unvaccinated; if they were not safe, then the vaccines were dubious at best and useless at worst.
The proliferation of boosters was clearly an admission of failure. All one had to do was think. As Thomas Paine reflected in Common Sense, “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” But that is really a form of not thinking, period.
Additionally, was it not obvious that something was amiss when crowded emporia like Walmart and Costco remained open in the darkest days of the pandemic while small shops and businesses catering to a minimal clientele were ruthlessly closed? Government-licensed liquor and cannabis stores did a thriving business while churches and social clubs were shuttered.
As law professor Bruce Pardy argued for C2C Journal, “Large players are allowed to operate in regulated oligopolies in a system of crony corporatism, while small independent entrepreneurs get red tape and corrupted, unequal market competition.” The administrative state is in total control, squeezing out middle-class entrepreneurs and small business people to the advantage of an Armani-socialist, oligarchic overclass. COVID was just what the doctor ordered — and administered.
Was it not equally obvious that large demonstrations of politically favored groups like BLM and Antifa were permitted while social distancing rules were rigorously enforced between single individuals? Was it not patently suspicious that repurposed, affordable and effective drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were censured and that the wholesome regimen of Vitamin D and vigorous activity was written off?
Did people not notice that Anthony Fauci and Canada’s Chief Health Officer Theresa Tam were all over the map with their recommendations and restrictions? Moreover, it has been known for some time, despite the chorus of hyperventilating denials, that transmission occurs among the vaccinated and possibly even shedding. In any event, the ‘Covac’ subterfuge should have been already obvious to any interested observer, irrespective of the frantic posturing of the mainstream cast of thousands. Something, as they say, didn’t compute.
As Lord Sumption has written, “it is the right and duty of every citizen to look and see what the scientists have said, and to analyse it for themselves, and to draw commonsense conclusions… there's no particular reason…that we have to resign our liberty into the hands of scientists.” Yet it seems a vast multitude has done precisely that, though all it takes is common sense and a modicum of curiosity to arrive at evident conclusions. The prospect for independent thought is not encouraging.
As a case in point. Nuclear Medicine Physician at the University of Alberta Dr. William Makis has conducted a survey of Manitobans revealing that vaccine “keeners” outnumber “skeptics” by 59% to 9%, a bad sign readily extrapolated to societies in general. A majority of people are plainly victims of their own myopia, timorousness, and self-conceit. After all, people do not like to admit they have been duped and will do everything they can to avoid the recognition that they may harbor a toxic substance in their bodies — which, to rub salt in the wound, they have willingly sought or accepted. They have, as it were, absorbed the lie wholeheartedly.
In John Milton’s phrase from Areopagitika, men of “a sensible nostril,” who value time and study, should be able to sniff out fraud wherever it presents itself. It is not that difficult. In any event, a vital population educated in its constitutional rights, aware of clinical precedents and hysterical mass irruptions, refusing to be enserfed, and capable of making prudent choices would have seen through the COVID charade and vaccine scandal. They would have resisted rather than furthered the costly travesty that has been imposed on them.
“Our world is in terrible trouble,” write Peter and Ginger Breggin, authors of COVID-19 and the Global Predators. “Too many have died, and we fear that we are only at the beginning of the dying.” When a free society collectively agrees to take the authorities at their word and surrender its freedoms and even undertakes to hasten its demise, rushing pell-mell to the injection sites, we are witnessing a failure of intelligence and a sapping of character, along with a critical dearth of common sense, the besetting vices of the progressivist West, as they were the mortal defects of the Roman Republic.
“The state-worshippers of the left,” writes Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior, “are fearful of a populace that is strong, healthy, disciplined, self-reliant, clear-thinking, and politically dissident. Totalitarians require a society of weak, flaccid, dependent, cowed dullards” — a society devoid of common sense and the courage to act upon it.
As the Roman poet Juvenal wrote in Satires, Book I, Rarus enim ferme sensus communis (Common sense is generally rare among those of higher rank). This is palpably true. The political elite may be justly described as a confederacy of dunces. The problem is that common sense is generally absent on almost every rung of the social ladder and that it is in short supply practically wherever we may look. The obvious dilemma is that common sense may be a native endowment and cannot be taught, though some may hope it can be stirred by continuous insistence on fact and evidence and on undeniable events as they occur. As Paine reflected in Common Sense, “Time makes more converts than reason.”
But the real issue is broached in his Rights of Man: “Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person.” This is what is meant by common sense — to see clearly, to think for oneself, to know what is required. The early and revolutionary American spirit now seems to have fallen into abeyance. One recalls the pointed joke about that awkward moment when a zombie looking for brains walks right by you.
