Consequences

“All sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of experience, the mother of all knowledge.” Leonardo da Vinci

The term “science” comes from the classical Latin “scientia” meaning knowledge, and da Vinci’s quote above makes clear where that comes from. Knowledge based on experience and observation is called “empirical” rather than theoretical. This is an essential differentiation as an unproven theory is not knowledge, and therefore not real until it is proven to be so through experience and observation; if you want to understand what reality is, you rely on the empirical.

Aristotle stated that empiricism derives from the perception of our senses, which is the source of the concepts in terms of which we seek to understand reality. Another word for this is commonsense, an essential skill for survival and the most important one that we can teach our children; there is a definite learning experience in this as Mark Twain explains when he said that “Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.” Commonsense is a skill of logic, especially when considering that there are always consequences of what we decide to say and do.

It is apparent that common sense is not so common for governments as they repeatedly ignore empirical evidence and subsequently the obvious consequences of their policies, yet somehow expect different results; it’s like failing an open book test where history has recorded this. There are many examples of government perpetuating or repeating policies that make things worse; inflation is a great example. Repeatedly, based on some crisis the government either created or imagined, our money supply was increased, which meant more of it chasing goods and services. While the currency increase is monetary inflation, the inevitable consequence is price inflation. Governments do not admit to errors, they only seek to blame something or someone else, which in this case is greedy business; anyone with common sense should see through such deflections from reality.

There are many more examples where commonsense is ignored because most politicians are tone deaf to reality. To focus on a solution, we need first to identify a real problem, and empirical evidence is where to start; partisan narratives are not reality but virtue signaling that plays well for elections, but not for solutions, and if we embrace them, we may yet become the society of George Orwell’s 1984 where “The heresy of heresies was common sense.”