For the last month I’ve been reading Common Sense, Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet arguing that the colonies had not just the right but the obligation to break from a system that no longer served them. It’s short. It’s blunt. And it was written for ordinary people, not academics — that was the point. Paine wanted the argument in the hands of everyone, because he understood that real change doesn’t start in parliaments or palaces. It starts when enough people stop accepting what they’ve been told to accept.
Reading it now, in 2026, I keep circling back to the same question: do we need another Thomas Paine? Something, or someone, that shakes us out of the placid, simple-minded acceptance of what’s going on around us?
My mind goes first to politics, because that’s the obvious target. But the more I sit with it, the more I think business and — especially — education are the quieter disasters. Politics gets the outrage. Business and education get the shrug. We’ve built entire systems on inertia: run the way they’ve always been run, taught the way it’s always been taught, structured for a world that stopped existing a while ago. And instead of rebuilding them, we patch them. We accept “unstructured disaster” as the cost of doing business, literally and figuratively.
So what’s the obstacle? Why don’t we revolt — or at least go find our common sense again?
I don’t think it’s a lack of awareness. Most people know something is off. I think it’s that revolt requires two things most of us have stopped believing we have: a clear diagnosis of what’s actually wrong, and a genuine belief that acting on it will change anything. Paine’s genius wasn’t that he was angrier than everyone else. It’s that he made the argument legible — he turned a vague, diffuse discomfort into a clear case that ordinary people could act on. Without that clarity, discomfort just sits there. It becomes background noise. Placid acceptance.
That’s the obstacle, I think: not apathy, but the absence of a clear enough argument to act on. We’re drowning in complaints and short on arguments.
I don’t have Paine’s answer for business or education yet. But I think the exercise is the same one he modeled: stop accepting the system as a given, ask plainly whether it still serves the people inside it, and if not, say so in language anyone can act on.
Maybe that’s the real value of going back to Common Sense two hundred and fifty years later. Not nostalgia for the American Revolution, but a reminder of what it actually takes to move a placid, accepting mass of people toward change: not more outrage, but a common-sense argument, stated plainly enough that ignoring it stops being an option.
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