Walking the mile to the local M&S, I had an annoying earworm of ‘Second Hand Rose,’ as sung by Barbra Streisand channeling Fanny Brice:

Everyone knows I’m just
Second hand Rose
From Second Avenue

I could not imagine why this song was so persistent in my head and, only on the return, as I approached my front door, did I recall that I had received this tweet, in regard to Israel uncovering arms caches in Jenin and killing ten young Palestinian men in gunfights.

This is not unusual, and even the intensifying ‘Everyone knows’ is not unusual, but I do tend to hover doubtfully over this assertion of universal knowledge, which I believe occurs when the speaker wants to amass notional support for their personal point of view. I would be inclined to say that everyone knows a triangle has three sides, a tautological truth, but one might find some rogue individual who does not know the meaning of triangle, or reasons that its meaning is other than a three sided, two dimensional shape. And ‘Everyone knows’ is often used of non-tautological statements.

If someone argued ‘Everyone knows that Boris Johnson is a liar,’ they might be ascribing universal knowledge on the basis of the findings of the House of Commons Privileges Committee against Johnson, in tandem with a popular perception. ‘Everyone knows that Corbyn is a terrorist sympathizer’ could be said by someone who is is so sure this is self-evident that they think there can be no disagreement on the matter.

But we know that there is always disagreement, especially about political judgments.

It is many years since I first read Descartes and was convinced by him that the beginning of certain knowledge is Cogito ergo sum; Sum res cogitans, ‘I think therefore I am; I am a thinking thing.’ He did not generalize this so far as to pluralize it into ‘We think therefore we are,’ which was beyond his direct experience, although Descartes did untangle himself from solipsism by reasoning the reality of a benevolent Creator.

Everyone knows solipsism is false – that I am not the only sentient being – or maybe not everyone. I am inclined to suppose that ‘Everyone knows’ is psychological rather than epistemological – not a view about knowledge so much as a need to identify with a group, the larger the better. In a political statement, one may want to marshall a hypothetical crowd, marching in step behind the speaker.

Shelley’s ‘We are many, they are few,’ was adapted as a tagline to suggest multitudes of Labour supporters during election campaigns resulting, as it happened, in Conservative governments. Those who believed the literal truth of the tagline claimed that the elections were rigged, similarly to Donald Trump’s judgment on losing a Presidential election to Joe Biden.

How many are ‘the Many’? Are they outnumbered by ‘the Few’?

‘Everyone knows’ may mean ‘everyone I know’. In the General Election campaign of 2015, I began to think that Labour would see off the Lib-Con Coalition and that Ed Miliband would be Prime Minister. This was my hope, but my growing confidence in the outcome was informed by the fact that I didn’t know anyone who admitted to voting Conservative, in real life or in social media circles. The Lib-Dems support was scattered and depleted. Everyone I knew wanted Ed for PM.

Everyone knows it didn’t happen. I put the words ‘Everyone knows’ into Twitter search and see it is widely employed on a variety of subjects. It signifies ‘I know and most people agree with me’ or ‘This information is available to the majority of people.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 1

Did Jane Austen mean that it was universally acknowledged or was she speaking as Mrs Bennet, for whom this was the guiding principle during the course of Pride and Prejudice? I think she was introducing us to Mrs Bennet’s world, where wealthy bachelors signified the chance of advantageous marriages for her five daughters.

I knew someone who favoured the first person plural when recounting any personal anecdote from the past. He was neither monarch nor Pope, and I thought the reasoning was that he liked to present himself as being a member of a group, justified by consensus.

There is indeed such a thing as consensus, although it falls short of unanimity. When I was a child, the consensus was belief in God, admiring Winston Churchill and standing up for the National Anthem. These now seem more particular than consensual.

The biblical psalms are mostly written in the first person, the psalmist alone with his thoughts and with God. Even kingship does not encroach on David’s solitude and, on the cross, Jesus invokes the loneliness of King David in Psalm 22: ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’

The desire to identify as a group was noted by Martin Heidegger who, in Sein und Seit coined the expression ‘Das Man’ – usually translated as ‘The They’. The individual is tempted to flee from his solitary condition and become one among others, as in ‘…they say’ – an undefined plurality, not bounded by finitude and whose mortality is nothing other than the mortality of the species.

‘Everyone knows’ is too all-encompassing for my taste although there are certainly verified facts widely known, eg the approximately spherical shape of the planet Earth. Nevertheless Flat Earthers still exist. One might adopt Nigel Molesworth’s phraseology in his accounts of life at Saint Custard’s School.

The earth is round, as any fule kno.