Ordinary People Matter

In the long run, a society's strength depends on the way that ordinary people voluntarily behave.  Ordinary people matter because there are so many of them.  Voluntary behavior matters because it is hard to supervise everyone all the time. ...  Successful societies -- those which progress economically and politically and can control the terms on which they deal with the outside world -- succeed because they have found ways to match individual self-interest to the collective good.  The behavior that helps each person will, as a cumulative ethos, help the society as a whole.

-- James Fallows (2 August 1949 -), American print and radio journalist.  He was also one of Nader's Raiders at Public Citizen and Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter for the first two years of his presidency, More Like Us : Making America Great Again (1989), p. 13