“If peeing your pants is cool, consider me Miles Davis.” – Gladys O’Connor, Billy Madison
In the 1995 film Billy Madison, starring Adam Sandler, Sandler plays a spoiled nepo baby dropout with no aspirations other than to inherit his rich father’s business. When faced with his father’s impending retirement, Sandler strikes a deal with his father that he will return to school from the beginning and inherit the keys to the kingdom upon graduation. During one famous scene, Sandler is on a 3rd-grade field trip when one of his classmates wets himself and hides in a corner to mask his shame. To soften the classmates’ embarrassment, Sandler splashes his own pants with water and then proclaims to the 3rd grade that peeing your pants is actually cool. What follows is the entire class peeing themselves to not be left out.
Aside from this scene being absurd, the moral of this story is that consensus is often a desirable but foolish goal. Every ridiculous trend throughout history finds its appeal in consensus. Consensus is not based on the worthiness of an idea, but merely that an idea is coveted by many. This is the logical fallacy known as the Consensus Fallacy.
I’ve discussed it elsewhere, but the Consensus Fallacy is perfectly demonstrated in the 1950s experiments by psychologist Solomon Asch. Asch’s experiments placed a group of individuals in a room with one unwitting participant and then tasked the supporting cast with uniformly agreeing on the wrong answers to the questions. What Asch’s experiments showed is that an individual will often deny reality to conform to public sentiment, not to be cast out as a pariah.
The Consensus Fallacy is why the political season sees a flood of candidate signs, creating the appearance of mass public appeal. If everyone supports this candidate, you don’t want to be the odd one out, do you? This is why candidates adopt monickers like “Common Sense.” The objective is to create the illusion that, like you, a candidate or set of candidates is in possession of shared values, without naming or describing those values. It’s common sense, you see!
The problem with using “Common Sense” as an electable quality is that common sense is rarely common and often nonsense. The subjective nature of common sense says that it can mean whatever you need it to mean. There is no declaration of shared ideals. It is merely a “trust me, bro” variety of statement. “If you put me in office, you can be assured that I will make the correct vote according to my inherent rightness.”
The good news for Idaho voters, Republican ones in particular, is that the Idaho GOP Central Committee took the guesswork out of the process. They publish their shared values in the Idaho Republican Party Platform and then ask candidates seeking the Republican nomination to self-identify with them. If a candidate voluntarily declined, and instead runs on a “Common Sense” platform, you can be assured that those candidates don’t share your conservative values and are instead asking you to “trust me, bro.” A quick review of their voting records will show that, unlike common sense, this is objectively true.
Photo by Jenni Miska on Unsplash
- Common Sense & the Appeal To Consensus Fallacy - May 12, 2026
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