Model Citizens

An evolving, open project for developing a moral framework and governance system grounded in an honest examination of human behaviour.

Read and explore the framework at unrelated.info. Suggest edits and submit pull requests here on GitHub.

Shared direction: What we do now should leave a better future for those who come after us.

Status: Seed draft for criticism and development. These documents record starting commitments and questions, not established scientific conclusions or community consensus. The name does not imply that governance should depend on exemplary citizens.

An open repository for developing, testing, and refining ideas for healthier governance.

This project starts from a simple premise: people are capable of care and cooperation, but power, fear, status, scarcity, group loyalty, and material incentives can also produce corruption and exploitation. A viable system must therefore cultivate our better tendencies while limiting the damage caused by our worse ones.

How this repository works

Ideas should become more precise through a cycle of:

1. Principles — the values and constraints the system should embody.
2. Proposals — concrete mechanisms that could implement those principles.
3. Critique — adversarial examination, especially of failure modes and power concentration.
4. Experiments — small-scale tests, simulations, or real-world pilots.
5. Decision records — clear accounts of what was accepted, rejected, or left unresolved.

The aim is not to design a perfect society on paper. It is to build governance that remains corrigible: observable, contestable, adaptable, and difficult for any individual or faction to capture.

Starting questions

• How should power be distributed and prevented from accumulating?
• How can institutions account for tribalism without turning difference into permanent conflict?
• What makes exploitation structurally difficult rather than merely morally discouraged?
• How should dissent, exit, minority protection, and institutional repair work?
• How do we distinguish legitimate expertise from unaccountable authority?
• What evidence would show that a governance mechanism is actually healthy?

Repository map

• Shared goal — intergenerational stewardship and its limits.
• Human nature — systematic investigation of destructive tendencies, including our own.
• Moral Commons — candidate axioms, moral reasoning, and safeguards against capture.
• Scientific standards — criticism, evidence, Bayesian reasoning, and emotions.
• Open questions — important gaps in the seed system.
• docs/FOUNDATIONS.md — initial principles and design constraints.
• proposals/ — concrete mechanisms and institutional designs.
• critiques/ — objections, failure modes, and hostile analysis.
• experiments/ — simulations, pilots, and evidence.
• decisions/ — dated records of important project choices.
• templates/ — reusable formats for contributions.

Contribution norm

Criticism is part of construction. Every proposal should explain who might gain power from it, who might be harmed by it, how it could be captured, and how it could be corrected.

Contributions can begin with plain-language questions or critiques. See CONTRIBUTING.md.