The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government by Eric Liu, Nick Hanauer Read Free Book Online

because you didn’t contribute enough to stopping it. Either way, permission from someone else for you to act was never required.
 
     
     

    CITIZENSHIP: Machinebrain View
     

 
 
     
     

    CITIZENSHIP: Gardenbrain View
     

 
    Understanding the world as networked, complex, and adaptive frames our perspective. Any human population will have a wide range of behaviors, from completely altruistic to totally sociopathic. Some people will be criminal and dishonest, many others will simply be what social scientists call “free riders.” Free riders accept the benefits of their environment without being willing to pay the costs to create those benefits. This is well understood. What is now just as well understood is the destabilizing effect their behavior has on the group. Free riders gain initial competitive advantage over non-free riders, and thus put pressure on them. Companies that are allowed to cheat destroy industries by forcing all competitors into a race to the bottom. People who are free riders destroy communities by forcing citizens into the same behaviors.
    Anti-social contagions spread more readily than pro-social ones, for the same reason that it is easier to push things downhill than up, and easier to fall into vice than into virtue. The challenge is how to generate the right kinds of contagions.

Five Rules
     
    There are five rules we lay out for pro-social citizenship, and they reflect our epidemiological way of looking at civic life.
    Small acts of leadership compound. Participating in a town meeting on a proposed new highway. Leading a corps of afterschool reading tutors. Persuading other voters to support a ballot measure. These are forms of citizenship. So is turning off a running faucet. Picking up a candy wrapper. Helping someone with a heavy load. True citizenship is about treating even the most trivial choice as a chance to shape your society and be a leader. It is laying down habits that scale up throughout society. It is not just setting an example; it is actively leading others to copy you. The science of complex adaptive systems teaches us that small acts, tiny everyday choices, accrue and compound into tipping points. We believe that the systems of the body politic, like the systems of the human body, are fractally interrelated. Just as the tiniest capillaries ramify into like-shaped webs of arteries, so too do the smallest pathways of civic action yield similar patterns of politics and common life. Tiny acts of responsibility are replicated, scale upon scale, and thus every act is inherently an act of leadership—either in a pro-social or anti-social way. Every one of us can set off a cascade. Understood thus, the habits and culture of citizenship aren’t good for social health; they are essential for it. In schools, homes, firms, and every domain, adults have to be more comfortable talking about and modeling character in the most modest-seeming of acts. And as we will discuss more below, government at every turn should be helping citizens take responsibility in small ways too.
    Infect the supercarriers. If we look at good citizenship as a contagion, but as a contagion we want to accelerate rather than contain, then it behooves us to search out the supercarriers—the nodes of networks in every community whose influence and reach are disproportionate. Then it behooves us to infect them. We ensure that they model the kind of pro-social behavior we want, talk about it, and reward it in their own networks. The supercarriers need not be the obvious and most visible leaders; in every circle, there are those who, regardless of station, are so trusted by others that they can make a meme spread very rapidly. Whether you are a neighborhood activist or a youth organizer or a marketer, it has become more necessary than ever to learn and to teach the skills of reading network maps, identifying the nodes, and developing educational and other persuasive strategies for activating those nodes.
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