Public life depends not only on laws, institutions, and formal reasoning, but also on shared ways of perceiving, judging, and responding to the world. These shared faculties, often taken for granted, can be understood as civic sense, common sense, and a sense of humour.
Introductory Perspectives
Civic sense fosters responsibility, empathy, and participation in collective life, common sense enables individuals to grasp everyday realities and social norms, and comic sense allows societies to reflect on themselves through humor, irony, and self-critique. In contemporary public life, however, these senses appear increasingly fragmented or absent, replaced by political polarization, technocratic rationality, inflammatory discourse, and growing environmental precarity. Exploring the ‘missing sense’ in public life through the lens of civic, common, and comic senses reveals not only what has been lost, but also what may be recovered to strengthen democratic culture, social cohesion, and public understanding. We should strive to create useful things/best practices that matter to others and make a meaningful difference. This article attempts to make sense of rational decision-making processes through the lens of civic, common, and comic senses, reflecting the general manifestations of the power of lateral thinking in changing our perspective on thinking to start a journey that will transform our lives for a clean and orderly society.
Making Sense of Civic Sense
Civic sense is the unwritten code of conduct, representing social ethics, respect for public property, and consideration for others’ rights. It involves the awareness and responsibility individuals have towards their community and environment, guiding them to behave ethically in public spaces to promote welfare, safety, protection, and order, following rules, keeping surroundings clean, respecting property, and showing consideration for others. It’s about understanding our role in society beyond our home, fostering a peaceful, orderly, and functional community through basic etiquette and public-spiritedness, contrasting individual actions with collective well-being.
Key aspects of civic sense include social responsibility, adhering to social ethics and duties for the common good, public behavior like queuing, following traffic rules, maintaining cleanliness, and respecting public property, consideration for others, showing patience, discipline, and respect in public interactions. Misuse of quota certificates, queue jumping, and traffic violations, such as ignoring signals or lane discipline, vandalising buses/trains, littering, spitting in public, or damaging parks, are all part of the behavior often observed in India. Furthermore, environmental care and being mindful of one’s impact on shared spaces and natural biodiversity are key to community and environmental well-being. Protecting intact forest ecosystems, which are brimming with biodiversity, is crucial. Reducing, reusing, and disposing of waste responsibly is essential in promoting sustainability.
One perspective is adherence to unspoken rules and moral behavior (social ethics/norms) that ensures smooth social functioning and consideration for others’ feelings. A strong civic sense relies on efficient public systems and effective governance, not just individual effort, and highlights how neglect can undermine it. It is essential to nurture civic sense from childhood, during the developmental stage, with parental guidance (communicating confidence) and school education (disciplinary common sense, understanding unintended consequences, risks, and regulations), as well as teaching empathy, respect, and social responsibility. Developed countries have individuals with a strong civic sense, in contrast to developing countries, where there are differences in cleanliness, law-abiding, public order, and the critical importance of unintended consequences.
A strong civic sense enables government schemes to succeed and helps society flourish by creating cleaner, safer, and more orderly environments, thereby improving the quality of life for everyone. It requires a shift from passive, irresponsible behavior to active, disciplined participation in community life. It’s a mutual agreement or ‘social contract’ where individuals contribute to public welfare, and the community benefits from shared responsibility. However, common challenges in the Indian context include insufficient civic education and awareness, weak enforcement of rules, poor public infrastructure, low trust, weak institutions, low shame, high personal gain, and a prevailing mindset that public spaces are ‘no one’s property’ or ‘someone else’s’ responsibility. These issues stem from historical neglect, administrative inefficiencies, social disparities, and a lack of consistent civic education, requiring a cultural shift towards collective responsibility. There is a need to improve civic education, and following rules should become the behavioral pattern, and heavy penalties should be imposed for misuse of any facility, beating the inefficient system.
Key aspects of civic sense include public cleanliness (proper waste disposal, avoiding public urination, not spitting, using dustbins, respecting queues), respect for law and property (following traffic rules, valuing public infrastructure), consideration for others involving patience, giving up seats for senior citizens in buses/trains, empathy in public, and active participation, awareness and involvement in civic life and collective decision-making. Civic sense perspectives view it as essential social ethics, encompassing respect for public property, following laws of the land, cleanliness, environmental sanitation, and respectful behavior with fellow citizens, crucial for societal harmony. This awareness and practice are often lacking due to inadequate civic education and weak governance structures, with competing viewpoints emphasizing either individual responsibility or systemic and structural failures. There is a need for early upbringing to foster responsible behavior and attitudes, such as following traffic rules, proper waste disposal, and helping others. In essence, civic sense is viewed, from individual duty to societal function levels, with a common thread of building a more organized, respectful, and habitable environment for everyone.
Civic sense is the forgotten superpower that can transform society, through a journey to nurture our body and mind (helicopter view). The government must consistently enforce compliance with the rule of law and consent, promote public-private partnerships, actively encourage diversification, and engage cautiously with citizens to rebuild trust in society. If the topic of civic sense evades from media discourse for an extended period, readers should call for its reinstatement as a sustained reminder for the wider public. A significant, deliberate, and widespread adoption of responsible, ethical, and thoughtful behavior is the ultimate, crucial solution to societal problems, functioning as a booster dose to improve public life.
Uncommon Common Sense
Common sense is the innate, experience-based understanding of day-to-day life that protects us and helps us adapt to our surroundings. Common-sense perspectives are practical, everyday understandings and judgments based on shared experiences, basic logic, and intuition, serving as an informal guide for daily life. It’s about making sound decisions without complex reasoning, from knowing how to check the weather to understanding basic cause-and-effect. Its key characteristics include practical knowledge from everyday experiences, a shared understanding based on beliefs, intuitive awareness, and a basic perception of situations, which are culturally influenced as they can differ significantly across cultures and social groups. It can be seen as a universal guide and a fundamental human cognitive tool for navigating the world. It is especially applicable in specific fields, such as common-sense psychology in understanding mental states or common-sense morality in basic ethical intuitions.
In essence, common sense provides a baseline for understanding, but recognizing its limitations and cultural influences is crucial for deeper understanding and avoiding conflict. Common sense is a fundamental approach grounded in reason, focused on reducing ideas to their most basic truths without cognitive biases. Applying this principle to public spaces, by avoiding littering, obeying traffic signals, paying taxes, behaving decently in public, respecting others’ personal space and needs, and keeping public toilets clean, is considered a master stroke, as it addresses complex systemic problems at the grassroots level. A pragmatic and neutral perspective leads to better-informed practical decisions, placing ordinary citizens at the tremors of national transformation. A combination of common sense and compassion in governing philosophy can provide the right and inclusive solutions to contemporary problems and the eventual course of action.
Comedy Classroom with a Twist
Comedy sense, or a ‘sense of humor,’ is the ability to perceive, appreciate, or express what is funny, amusing, or ludicrous. It is a multi-dimensional personality trait used to describe, predict, and explain humor-related differences among people, serving as a source of pleasure, comfort, defense, and social bonding. It involves a combination of recognizing the difference between what is expected and what happens, irony, and social commentary. It often means not taking life too seriously and being able to find humor in various complex situations, mirroring the predictable behavior patterns of people. A high level of this skill often includes the ability to laugh at oneself, which can indicate self-confidence and the capacity to see the world through others’ eyes. It involves recognizing the absurdity in human behavior or everyday life. The types of humor can range from high comedy (wit, satire, wordplay) to low comedy (slapstick, physical humor).
Components of humor involve the juxtaposition of opposites or unexpected elements, a sudden superiority, sometimes derived from recognizing the mistakes of others, and a release of tension, often through taboo-breaking or nonsense. The primary aim is to make people laugh, often by holding a mirror up to society to reflect its follies and vices, or simply to entertain. Comedy can serve as a social corrective function, using laughter to bring individuals back into conformity with societal norms. Comedy in various contexts ranges from stand-up to film and television, uses irony to critique social or political institutions, or makes light of dark or taboo subjects. Simple observations in our daily lives, with a sense of humor framework, help make sense of the world around us.
The task of correcting societal flaws and injustices begins with individual awareness and extends through collective action, requiring both a broad perspective and depth of vision to effect meaningful change. A sense of humour is a crucial, evolved human trait that serves as a basic mechanism for mental, physical, and social well-being, directly contributing to human progress by fostering resilience, creativity, and social cohesion. Positive, ‘light’ humor fosters mental health, well-being, and social connection, serving as a ‘social lubricant’ and facilitating cooperation, transformation, evolution, and growth.
Concluding Remarks
Ideas and feelings, extracted from daily experiences, often help us make sense of complex problems, and effective visualizations have a dramatic influence on the best possible outcomes. The absence of civic, common, and comic senses in contemporary public life signals more than a cultural shift; it reflects a deeper erosion of shared judgment, mutual responsibility, and self-reflective awareness. Without common sense, public discourse loses its grounding in lived reality; without civic sense, collective life fragments into private interests and antagonistic identities; and without a shared sense of humor, society forfeits its capacity for humility, critique, and renewal. Recovering these interrelated senses does not require nostalgia for a simpler past, but a renewed commitment to cultivating shared understanding, self-development in action, serious democratic engagement, and the ability to laugh, especially at ourselves.
Reintegrating civic, common, and comic senses into public life is therefore essential not only for healthier discourse but for sustaining the ethical and imaginative foundations of a vibrant and resilient democracy. The convergence of these three senses can profoundly shape how individuals navigate daily life, engage with their communities, and adapt to the challenges of an era defined by information saturation and digital complexity. The concept implies that to truly advance, a society does not need more laws; it needs a booster dose of daily, personal, responsible action. It is about changing individual behavior to create a better and more harmonious society.
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