Paine also said that society is good. That government is but the necessary to maintain it as it grows.

And I worry that what government we have now is not very effective. Health care in the US is a mess. Building anything has grown vastly more expensive, be it buildings, rail, or ships. We have countless laws protecting corporate IP, lobbyists a gazillion, and corporations regularly court shop to get whatever judicial treatment they desire.

The idea of a government focused on efficiency, that is trying to share and spread intelligence & knowledge & know how, that tried to help make us efficient at housing and food and health care: that feels, well, sort of essential at this point to maintaining what Paine loved & cherished: society.

And giving a nation back some purpose, some meaning: that can help bring us together too, perhaps. A purpose make a world that won't over consume, that has a chance to house & feed & care for itself, for hundreds, thousands, or vastly more years: that feels like such a potential antidote to the poison of reckless abandon & foolery that so many brutal nasty little value-less children have beset upon the world, have dissoluted our empathy & perpetrated mercenary anti-social campaigns against the world with. We need value systems that look forward, that care broadly, and that place a reasoned, scientific view as a pole star, and that seek actions not grandiose for grandiosity sake, but to serve us all, to bring an efficient, livable, social societal world out.

Our scale is perhaps a bit bigger than what Paine could have imagined, our numbers vastly more. I fear the Bowling Alone future only intensifies. I would not throw out Paine, but I do think we ought be open to asking what values our society shows for itself, asking if the values have kept up & are adequate, and we ought be open to assessing how governments might better enable societal values we think we need or perhaps just want to see. Technocracy's suggestion that those who care deeply about how the world works, and already have a life of servant leadership, seems atuned, to me, of being ideal for maintaining a society of fewer ills, and being willing to reduce their own role as we do get more efficient, as our ills and evils receed. While inspiring better.