The Death of Common Sense

How Ideology Has Replaced Reality in Policy Debates

Reality Is Not Bigotry

Common sense is the first victim when ideology becomes a jealous god. We used to agree on the baseline truths that anchor a civilization: there are two biological sexes; parents are primary stewards of their children; merit matters; words mean what they mean. These are not partisan talking points. They are first principles. They are the furniture of reality, the table at which every healthy society sits to hash out its differences.

Today, however, we are told that noticing obvious truths is hate; that naming reality is violence; that the path to progress runs through the demolition of definitions. A culture cannot survive long when it confuses compassion with incoherence. Mercy without truth is not kindness, it’s quicksand.

The Great Swap: Truth for Theory

In our time, sophisticated lies have dressed themselves in lab coats and legal robes. We hear that sex is a spectrum without boundaries, that men can compete against women in physical sports with no unfairness involved, and that to question any of this is to commit a moral crime. The effect is a grand societal gaslight: we are asked to ignore the evidence of our senses and replace it with the edicts of committees.

The shift is subtle but devastating. Once, we asked: “What is true?” Now we are told to ask, “What must I say to be safe?” Once, we debated data and definitions. Now we recite slogans and hope the algorithm spares us. Once, we prized the integrity to state what is, even if it offended delicate ears; now, we punish the integrity and praise the euphemism.

Scripture warns about this moment: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,” and, by extension, who call obvious truths offensive lies. When a Supreme Court nominee can tell the world she cannot define “woman” because she is “not a biologist,” it is not simply a rhetorical dodge, it is a rupture. If the guardians of our law cannot voice basic definitions, what confidence can the people have that those laws will be just?

The Fog Machine

Ideology functions like a fog machine on a stage: it looks dramatic but obscures the set. Instead of dealing with the hard edges of reality, we pour more fog, hoping the audience won’t notice the missing scenery.

Consider the debate over women’s sports. The simple truth is that male and female bodies are not interchangeable. This is not a slur; it’s a gift. It is the foundation of women’s sports, women’s privacy, and women’s safety. To pretend otherwise requires a cascade of denials: deny the strength differential, deny the performance gap, deny the fairness owed to female athletes who train their whole lives for a level playing field. Compassion for individuals need not mean contempt for reality. Yet the fog insists we choose: be kind or be honest. Nonsense. True kindness dignifies the truth.

Or look at the revisionism that insists humanity’s history was never marked by complementary roles between men and women, only oppression and social constructs all the way down. What begins as a corrective to past chauvinism too often becomes a new dogma: if you won’t confess the creed, you’re a heretic. But the better path is humble inquiry rooted in the obvious: men and women are equal in worth and dignity and different in ways that matter. Civilization was built not by erasing difference but by harmonizing it.

The Chessboard and the Mirror

Ideology plays chess with human lives. Every piece is abstract, every move is “for the cause,” and the pawns, always the pawns, bear the cost. But reality is a mirror. It does not care about our slogans; it reflects what is. Place a biological male on a girls’ podium, and the mirror shows the displacement of a daughter’s dream. Change the definition of marriage, parenthood, or sex in law, and the mirror shows downstream consequences in family stability, child well-being, and social trust. Smash the mirror if you like; you have not changed your face.

We need less chess and more mirrors. Less theory and more testimony. Ask the girls who finish fourth when there are only three medals. Ask the parents whose authority is overridden by bureaucrats who believe the state knows the child better than the family. Ask the doctors who are told to deny biology to keep their jobs. The story is the same: “We were told to look away from the mirror.”

Roads, Gates, and GPS

Jesus spoke of a narrow gate leading to life. Common sense is one such gate. It constrains our appetites; it narrows our speech to what is true; it directs our love toward what is good. The broad road is always easier: say what the crowd says; chant what the crowd chants. But the broad road leads to a cliff. Our cultural GPS, the moral sense informed by nature and nature’s God, is being jammed by ideological interference. We are missing exits we can’t afford to miss.

A free people must recover the discipline of sanity: to prefer reality over rhetoric, testable claims over trendy catechisms, principles over pressure. Freedom without truth is drift. Truth without courage is silence. Courage without love is cruelty. We are called to all three, truth, courage, and love, held in tension by grace.