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Uncommon Sense

By Peter Lloyd

Common sense makes it irrefutably clear that the sun comes up in the east, rides across the sky, and drops down behind the horizon in the west. For all practical purposes, this common-sense understanding works just fine for almost everything most of us do any day of the week.

No need to understand that we’re hurtling through space on a spinning mass of rock and lava when you want to decide where to plant a shade tree, position your solar panel, or find your way out of the woods. Using the false model, you can even explain the changing of the seasons or why folks elsewhere on the planet live simultaneously in different hours of the day.

The common-sense fallacy of the geocentric model won’t even delay your space vacation, if you can afford to buy a ticket from Space Adventures.

Wrong Is Not Right
You do need to know that the earth revolves around the sun, however, if you’re responsible for getting a vehicle from the earth to somewhere else in the solar system. If you want to make accurate predictions about the future of the earth. Or if you want to advance to the fifth grade.

Te reach these and many more nobler objectives, creative people attack common sense. Sometimes like a plague. Sometimes like a pesky pair of mosquitos. Armed with uncommon sense, the most unrepentantly creative defy conventions when they have nothing better to do. They instinctively contradict assumptions, sacred cows, and old saws. To inventors, artists, and innovators, common sense just doesn’t cut it.

drawing of chimps see no evilWhen the great philosophers and writers, humorists, and academicians praise common sense, they’re talking, of course, about the useful fictions you use as shortcuts to get around every day. They certainly don’t mean to belittle the profound concepts that contradict common sense.

Keep It Uncommon
You don’t have to go back to the 1925 Scopes Trial to find the smug, apathetically incurious, who cough up hard-to-swallow evidence or counterintuitive theories in favor of easier-to-swallow, so-called common sense. Unfortunately pitiful appeals to common sense in defense of nonsense remain common.

If you get a kick out of explaining that there is no sky or that roses aren’t really red, you know the thrill of exposing conventional wisdom and common sense as nonsense. Like Albert Einstein you appreciate that, “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”

Creative people everywhere need your support. Stay in the race—the human race to outpace numbskull notions spuriously labeled as common sense out of fear for the uncommon truth some can’t or don’t want to understand.

See also:
Songwriter, author, ghostwriter, copywriter, and content provider Peter Lloyd syndicates Right Brain Workouts and blogs for businesses including CoachQuest.

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