How the Just Citizens Experiment Will Begin—and How You Can Help Build It
The Just Citizens Experiment: Rebuilding Self-Government (Part 3)
Author’s Note:
This series marks the beginning of a live experiment. Not a commentary on politics or a newsletter of information, but an attempt to build something new: a citizen-led system for practicing self-government in a modern age. Over this series of essays, I’ll share the problem as I’ve come to understand it, the structure we are building through Just Citizens, and an open invitation for those willing to help test and shape it. This is early. It will be imperfect. But if self-government is going to work again, it will have to be built—from the citizen up.
In the previous essays, I described a problem and an idea.
The problem is that modern self-government lacks a structure through which citizens can deliberate together and produce coordinated action. Millions of people care about the future of their country, but the mechanisms available to them—voting, commentary, petitions, activism—rarely allow those concerns to translate into durable decisions that shape public policy.
The idea introduced in the last essay was simple: rebuilding self-government requires two things developing at the same time. First, citizens must cultivate the habits and character that allow them to participate responsibly in democratic life. Second, those citizens must have access to structures where their thinking can become coordinated action rather than isolated opinion. And here is the key—this must happen for a general assembly of citizens, not a case-by-case movement built around special interest issues.
To understand how this experiment unfolds, it helps to see the two engines working together.
So what does this experiment actually look like right now?
A small community is beginning to form. Members are testing a course called The Pursuit of Happiness: A Citizens’ Journey, built around ten habits and five pillars of personal formation. At the same time, we are building the framework for a Citizens Congress where those same members will eventually deliberate about national reform priorities. Early discussions are already forming around issues like the governance of artificial intelligence and the need for citizens to help shape the policies that will guide it.
None of this is finished. Much of it is still under construction. But the pieces are beginning to appear.
This essay is about how we begin assembling the right pieces. Not in theory, but in practice. Later in this essay, I’ll show you where you can see the early version of this experiment taking shape.
The Just Citizens project is beginning as a live experiment. It is not polished. It is not finished. In most places it is still being built. That is intentional. The purpose of this phase is not to present a finished institution but to begin constructing the tools, relationships, and community that might allow such an institution to emerge.
If self-government is going to be renewed, it will likely begin in this kind of imperfect space—where citizens experiment with new forms of civic life and slowly discover what works.
Why the Experiment Begins with the Citizen
The Just Citizens project begins with a simple but often overlooked premise: the quality of a republic ultimately reflects the quality of its citizens.
This observation is not new. From Aristotle to the American founders, political thinkers have long understood that institutions cannot function well unless the people who inhabit them possess certain habits of character. Self-government requires citizens who are capable of thinking clearly, exercising restraint, cooperating with others, and deliberating about difficult questions without collapsing into factional hostility.
Yet modern societies devote remarkably little attention to helping people develop those habits.
Schools teach history and government structures, but they rarely cultivate the personal disciplines that sustain civic life. Media ecosystems amplify outrage and conflict, or simply burry uncomfortable truths. Too many political organizations focus on mobilizing supporters rather than developing thoughtful participants in public life.
The result is a paradox. We expect citizens to govern themselves, but we invest very little in helping them learn how. [This is where someone with a bit of sass mentions that we are republic, downplays any democratic concept within representative government, and dismisses the issues that corrupt such a structure when crony capitalism drives the incentives of government away from the common good. Let’s continue].
The Just Citizens experiment begins by addressing that gap.
One of the first tools being developed is a course called The Pursuit of Happiness: A Citizens’ Journey. The title is drawn directly from the language of the Declaration of Independence, which identifies the pursuit of happiness as one of the central purposes of a free society.
But the pursuit of happiness is often misunderstood as a vague aspiration for personal satisfaction. In reality, happiness emerges from patterns of behavior—habits that shape how individuals relate to themselves, to others, and to the wider world.
The course explores ten practical habits organized around five pillars of human flourishing. When fully scaled, participants work through these habits together as part of a community, reflecting on how personal development strengthens both individual well-being and civic capacity.
The aim is not to create another self-help program. In fact, the spirit of the course is closer to a training lab than a lecture series. Imagine something less like a motivational seminar and more like a gym for personal development—a place where people show up regularly, practice habits, and support one another in the work of building stronger lives.
Why begin here?
Because any movement that asks citizens to invest their time, attention, and resources into the renewal of self-government must also invest in the flourishing of those citizens themselves. The relationship cannot be one-sided.
Many nonprofits focus on policy advocacy. Others focus on defending civil liberties. Our ambition is slightly different. We aim to become a civic organization that takes seriously the promise embedded in the American founding—that a free society should help its people pursue happiness in ways that strengthen both individual lives and the republic as a whole.
When individuals grow stronger, communities grow stronger. And when communities grow stronger, democratic life can improve in significant ways.
Building a Structure for Citizen Deliberation
But personal formation alone cannot repair a political system.
Even the most thoughtful and disciplined citizens cannot guide major reforms if there is no structure through which their thinking can become coordinated action.
This leads to the second engine of the Just Citizens experiment: the creation of a Citizens Congress.
The idea behind the Congress is straightforward. If citizens are going to play a meaningful role in shaping the future of their country, they need a civic body where they can deliberate about national issues in an organized way.
The Citizens Congress is designed to serve that purpose.
The charter for the Congress has already been developed, and every member of the Just Citizens community will also be a voting member of the Congress. As the membership base grows, the Congress will gradually organize committees capable of studying major issues, examining reform proposals, and presenting recommendations to the wider membership for deliberation.
This structure is not intended to replace existing institutions of government. Instead, it is designed to operate alongside them as a kind of civic superstructure—a place where citizens themselves can examine problems before those problems enter the partisan machinery of electoral politics.
The early work of the Citizens Congress will focus heavily on understanding the political problems that our current system struggles to solve. In many cases, reform stalls not because solutions are impossible, but because the underlying problems are poorly explained or because powerful interests won’t allow change to occur. When driven by the latter, those entrenched interests who benefit from the problems staying in place wield intense influence over elected representatives and parties. Issues become fragmented across partisan narratives, media framing, and technical jargon, making it difficult for the public to see how institutional incentives and structural constraints interact.
One of the most important tasks of the Citizens Congress will therefore be to analyze these challenges through systems thinking. By examining how institutions, incentives, and behaviors interact across the political system, the Citizens Congress can begin telling the story of complex problems in ways that citizens can understand together. When problems are explained clearly and comprehensively, citizens are able to see the structure of the challenge rather than just its symptoms.
When people share a clear understanding of a problem, the search for solutions becomes far more productive. Agreement on solutions may still take time, but the path toward reform becomes easier to imagine once citizens can see the problem through the same lens. Building trust in this process of clear explanation and deliberation will be one of the most important tasks of the early Citizens Congress.
The Early Steps of the Experiment
At this stage, the Just Citizens experiment is still in its formative phase. The tools are being built. The community is growing. The structures are being tested.
Several early initiatives are helping bring the project to life.
The Pursuit of Happiness course is being prepared as the first learning experience within the community. Participants who join early will have the opportunity to help refine its structure, test the habits it introduces, and shape the culture of the program as it develops.
Membership in the Just Citizens community is also expanding. Each new member strengthens the foundation required to launch the Citizens Congress, because the Congress itself depends on a sufficiently large membership base to support meaningful committees and deliberation.
At the same time, the project is beginning to explore how citizens can engage emerging national issues together. One early focus involves the governance of artificial intelligence, a technology that is rapidly transforming economic and civic life. A petition connected to this issue is being circulated as one of the first ways to raise awareness and invite broader participation in the experiment.
Other efforts involve identifying candidates for the 2026 congressional elections who might be willing to consider citizen-developed reform proposals as they emerge from a representative sample of constituents.
None of these steps alone will transform the political system. But together they represent the early scaffolding of a new civic infrastructure.
Movements rarely begin with grand declarations. More often they begin quietly, with a handful of experiments that slowly attract people who recognize the need for change.
An Invitation to Builders
Because this project is still early, those who participate now will help determine what it becomes.
But the most important thing to understand is this: Just Citizens is not a finished organization that people simply join.
It is an attempt to build something that does not yet fully exist.
The early members of this community are not customers or subscribers. They are participants in an experiment—people willing to explore whether citizens themselves can begin rebuilding the habits and structures that make self-government possible.
If that idea resonates with you, the next step is simple.
Take a few minutes to explore the early pages that describe the community and the emerging Citizens Congress. Look at what is being built. Decide for yourself whether the experiment seems worth pursuing.
You will likely find that some parts are still rough. Some ideas are still evolving. Some tools are still under construction.
That is because this effort is still in its formative stage.
And that is precisely why participation now matters. The people who engage during this early phase will help shape what this experiment becomes.
Some will help test the Pursuit of Happiness course as it develops. Others will help refine the structure of the Citizens Congress. Some will help bring new members into the community, while others will help identify the political problems that deserve serious citizen deliberation.
All of those contributions matter.
Because the truth is simple: if citizens want a system that works, they may have to build part of it themselves.
And that is where the Just Citizens experiment begins.
Next: An invitation to become a founding member of the Just Citizens movement.
In the coming essays of this series—The Just Citizens Experiment: Rebuilding Self-Government—we will examine several key topics. We will explore the invitation, the vision, and why you should care.
We do not have a system for citizens to think, decide, and act together at scale. So we’re building one. It’s a moonshot, but we have to give this a try.
Do you know someone who needs more happiness? Please share and invite others to subscribe.
Yeah, so let’s start a movement that welcomes all people and parties, but is led by independent thinkers offering objective analysis and proposals.
What is our mission? To revitalize American self-government by organizing our many voices into a potent reform effort centered on the Pursuit of Happiness and the American Dream.
Do you believe the United States should be just, peaceful, good, and free? Do you want to organize (or support others who do) to achieve reforms so big that neither major political party can do them alone? Do you want to champion human flourishing with liberty and dignity for all? Join us…
Perhaps one role Just Citizens can play is to vote on active legislation - not as actual legislators, but rather as a truly democratic voice that expresses the will of the citizen. Results could then be openly compared to the legislators' actual vote, and serve to underscore disparities between politicians, bureaucrats and simple citizens. Within JC, ballot stuffing would be prevented by a "lite" version of voter ID, and JC results would be released before the official decisions, effectively putting public servants on notice about what "we the people" want.