Everybody Knows

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes — Everybody knows.¹

There are few phrases in English more subtly treacherous than “everybody knows.” It carries the soft weight of inevitability, the suggestion that the facts at hand require no elaboration—because who would dispute them? The sentiment (whatever it is, on whatever subject it may be on) is so familiar that it feels like an ambient feature of the world itself, as if the knowledge in question were not merely widely accepted but woven into the very fabric of reality. Everybody knows that markets are efficient. Everybody knows that history bends toward progress. Everybody knows that decentralization is the future. But which everybody are we talking about?

Undoubtedly, however, everyone who reads this will disagree with one or more of those statements. That’s because truth is that “everybody” is never really everybody—it is always somebody's “everybody.”

What “everybody knows” in one social world is not necessarily what everybody knows in another. To the free market evangelist, everybody knows that markets self-regulate. To the left-leaning intellectual optimist, everybody knows that history bends toward justice. To certain tech enthusiasts, everybody knows that decentralization is the future. Each of these everybodies operates with the quiet confidence that their collective knowledge is correct and rarely amenable to the any of the many other consensus that other groups take for granted. Those groups, for their part, return the favor.

These various competing worldviews simply pass as common sense among the people who believe them. Indeed, it is the very reason that so many of us are totally confident in our own common sense while denying that anybody else has any. What we're talking about in these terms, however, isn't common sense proper but something altogether different.

What we are really talking about in these cases is called sensus communis. Though this pedantic Latin phrase looks like it means “common sense,” it’s mostly a false cognate. It's better translated as a “communal sense” or the “sense of the community,” and as a philosophical concept, it has been around at least since the days of Socrates. It simply means the established and expected norms, values, customs, and beliefs of any given group. It is the fabric of what "everybody knows"—not necessarily because it's true, but because it is what the group has collectively agreed upon so that they can navigate their interactions with one another without the need for constant renegotiation.

Sensus communis functions as the implicit social grammar that allows communities to coordinate behavior, communicate ideas, and anticipate how others will respond to any given situation. It is, in this sense, an essential feature of communal life, in that it provides the very conceptual frameworks communicating—after all, words only function normatively, meaning we must share some assumptions of what they mean in order to even make sense to each other. But the sensus communis does not not question itself. Its authority rests not on reason but on habit, consensus, and the sheer inertia of tradition.

While sensus communis is not the same thing as common sense proper, it serves as a necessary precondition for common sense to function by providing the conceptual and linguistic framework within which individual judgment can be articulated. Real common sense begins where sensus communis leaves off: in the act of weighing collective expectations against one's own reasoning and experience. It is the capacity to make a judgment that remains one’s own, even when it runs against the grain of the community. The relationship between the two is necessarily fraught. Common sense depends on the sensus communis to supply the shared assumptions that make judgment possible in the first place—but it must also retain the capacity to resist (or revise) those same assumptions when they no longer hold up under scrutiny.

Critiquing, revising, and improving upon the sensus communis is part of what it means to exercise common sense. However, it is extremely difficult, all but impossible, for common sense cannot function where the sensus communis has broken down or been outright rejected. This is the unfortunate spot we find ourselves in now. For this we can lay much of the blame squarely on social media companies, which first captured our attention and then, in their relentless pursuit of profit-by-engagement, fractured the shared channels through which we receive information. News no longer circulates through a common public square but through isolated streams of algorithmically curated content, each stream meticulously tailored to individual tastes, biases, and purchasing habits. The effect has been to splinter our collective understanding of reality like a kaleidoscope. The result is not merely widespread misinformation or mass delusion—though there is plenty of both—but something more insidious: the long, slow erosion of the faculty of judgment itself.

The great danger of our era is not simply that falsehoods circulate widely. It is that even true facts lose their power to compel judgment once the architecture of shared expectation collapses. If I expect that you will not believe the truth—or that others will expect you not to believe it—then the truth itself becomes irrelevant. Sensus communis decays into constant second-guessing, and common sense disappears entirely.

But if this dynamic can be engineered, it can also be reversed. The premise of this newsletter is that judgment is something that can be cultivated and recovered. Not as a return to some imagined golden age of consensus, but as a deliberate practice of learning to think alongside others without A) outsourcing our thinking to them, or B) getting into fights with them. What everybody knows may be broken, but the capacity to reason through it is not lost.

To recover good judgment in an era of collapsing trust is not to retreat into the private mind, nor to abandon the collective altogether. It is to rebuild the sensus communis as a shared discipline—an ongoing exercise in holding our own reason in dialogue with the imagined (and actual) judgment of others. This newsletter is a small attempt to chart that recovery: to think out loud, in public, about how common sense might yet survive a period in history that usually feels completely nonsensical.

So we start with this: sensus communis is not common sense, and good judgment is not something everybody has. But it is something that everyone can learn, given enough patience, discipline, and—most importantly—the willingness to think in good faith, which some people simply will not do.

That’s their loss; the rest of us will just have to move on without them.

1. Leonard Cohen, "Everybody Knows," from I'm Your Man, Columbia Records, 1988.

Cover image: Ramis, Harold. Groundhog Day. United States: Columbia Pictures, 1993.