For the Sake of the Common Good?

Shôn Ellerton, January 4, 2025
Why I cringe every time I hear that phrase, ‘for the sake of the common good’.

One of my favourite cartoonists of all time, Gary Larson, drew some marvellously politically incorrect pieces depicting some really stupid people. He drew one in which a chubby looking teenager tries to push a door that clearly says ‘pull’. At the entrance of the building is a sign saying ‘MIDVALE SCHOOL FOR THE GIFTED’. Yes, the ‘D’ is smaller, genius that Larson is!

But it reminds me of that most familiar of sayings.

‘For the sake of the common good’.

Most of us might have come across that phrase and many of us hold the idea that this must be a good thing.

But is it?

I wrote a piece some time ago instilling the idea that building public railway transportation is critical for keeping cities alive and flourished. Moreover, I purported that public railways are not meant specifically to make a profit, the reason being that the collective service it provides more than offsets the amount of money spent by taxpayers. Cities with poor public transportation suffer from vehicle congestion, dilapidated city centres, and urban sprawl littered with gigantic shopping malls.

Whilst writing that article, I made the fundamental mistake of pointing out that building public transportation was for the sake of the common good. Some of my readers quickly pointed this out quipping that doing anything for the sake of the common good amounts to going down the grey path of socialism and government control.

I should have re-worded it, but being somewhat puritanical, I kept the original piece untouched.

Whenever I now hear that phrase, ‘for the sake of the common good’, I tend to cringe because whatever it is being done ‘for the sake of the common good’ usually negatively impacts most other people because we need to cater for the lowest common denominator, which, in most cases, is very low indeed.

A lot of this common good thinking is often associated with a somewhat obnoxious word called safetyism. One book I highly recommend which discusses the topic of safetyism in detail is The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.

The rise of ‘safetyism’ is the biggest contributor to implementing measures to cater for the common good. Take for example, installing a visually unattractive steel cage along the walkway across major road bridges, like Sydney Harbour Bridge. Where there was once a sufficiently high enough parapet to prevent people from accidentally falling off the edge into the shark-infested waters below, measures were taken to prevent any attempt to deliberately jump off the bridge making it impossible to get wonderful unobscured views of the harbour from the bridge as one tried to peep through the mesh. However, on the flipside, considering the heavy footfall of the bridge, perhaps there is some justification to having such measures in place.

Where it all goes nutty is when governmental authorities implement safety measures quickly without much in the way of understanding how it will work and how it will impact others. Unfortunately, such measures are usually put in place after an incident had occurred rather than doing the necessary research to prevent a likely one from happening. But this can go too far. Great Britain, since the late 1990s, has seen much in the way of implementing over-the-top measures to eradicate any incident that might happen, whether it occurs in the workplace, in public settings, the schoolground, or even in your own home. I remember the news back then of some schools banning the game of conkers, in which horse chestnuts tied to a string are banged with other ones, the winner being the one with the strongest conker. I even heard of snowball fights being banned in schools in Britain.

Australia got even worse with what one can and cannot do at home. Theoretically, one is not allowed to change a plug without being a licenced electrician. This is a madness especially considering that back in 80s Britain, everyone had to know how to fit a plug on an appliance because appliances where sold without fitted plugs. You had to buy the plug separately and even more interestingly, one had to select the most appropriate fuse for the plug. Turned out that most people, out of ignorance or sheer laziness, just bought the maximum rated domestic fuse of 13 amperes! Just imagine that back then, most people had to have a Stanley knife, screwdrivers, and wire strippers and know which cable goes into which bit in the plug without shorting out the house. To this day, I never understood why some nincompoop decided it would be better to have the ‘live’ cable colour changed from red to brown, leaving the green as the ‘earth’, which, logically should have been brown to begin with!

Can you imagine what would happen if you tried to sell appliances without fitted plugs these days? Half the public would freak out not having a single clue how to do this, and if they did, they wouldn’t have the tools anyway.

Catering for the lowest common denominator is like designing everything so that any ignoramus can understand it. Many might say that this is based on good intentions, but in reality, it doesn’t work. This way of thinking stifles creativity, makes things more expensive, and ultimately, dampens the human spirit in search of adventure. Those who take pleasure in enforcing rules for the sake of the lowest common denominator are known as ‘wowsers’. Their sole and meaningless existence is to quash as much of our adventure DNA as possible in order to make it safe for a tiny percentage of the population.

A few years after the pandemic, the common good way of thinking proved to be utterly disastrous. Wear a mask on the beach so as not to have grandma killed? The phrase now seems so utterly preposterous but a few years ago, so many believed this crap and if you disagreed with it, the mob would be out to get you and try to cancel you out of existence. Today’s proponents of this way of thinking still argue that there wasn’t enough research to think otherwise. However, paradoxically, there was a vast amount of research which did take place, but the mainstream only accepted findings which fitted the narrative of the day.

The most recent and possibly most absurd example of catering for the common good surely must be Australia’s passing of a bill to make it illegal for anyone under 16 to use social media. I could write an entire piece on how this won’t work technically, but what got my attention were those who favoured it saying that passing such a bill is for the common good and will help save lives of young kids who are bullied on social media. What they fail to realise is that there are many under-16s who are incredibly bright and intelligent and use social media to connect with friends and family and to share their hobbies and interests. Some of them are enterprising and even have businesses through social media. Had those who devised this insane bill even thought about these kids? Probably not, because they are so small-mindedly focussed on the small percentage of those who are bullied on social media.

This is the problem when we have the mindset of thinking for the common good.

Ultimately, it kills off everything unique to us as human beings. Adventure, creativity, fun, and productiveness. All attributes thrown away by the self-serving bigots who wish to stick their noses into everybody’s business and police them into submission.

For the sake of the common good, of course!