People’s existing common sense makes them default to views supporting power.

Evidence

The public does not approach this process of “making sense of crime” tabula rasa. It brings to bear interpretative schema, uninspected assumptions, common sense, tacit knowledge, and forms of reasoning, many of which are already in place, though not necessarily in a logical, consistent, or evidential form (they are no less compelling for that). Especially when society feels threatened by the pace or direction of social change—as British society did when confronted by the unsettling effects of postwar “affluence” and migration in the 1950s/60s—the majority tends, commonsensically, to reproduce definitions and approaches to problems which are supportive of the existing structures of power: adopting, for example, “traditionalist” views on crime, race, and punishment. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1051

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Frankfurter notions of how pre-shaped consciousness tends to reproduce existing structures of domination. — connects to: Popularity emerges through struggle, so common sense always trails what people could become. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 734