If governance is a search, someone has to define what "better" means — or the search optimizes noise. Here is the deepest design decision in this proposal: citizens define the destination, not the route. The public's role is not to write policy, adjudicate mechanisms, or micromanage administration. It is to continuously broadcast the shape of the society they want to live in — and to judge, from lived experience, whether they're getting it. Specialists then compete to propose mechanisms that move toward that shape, and are paid, retained, or sunset strictly by whether the signal says it's working.
The whitepaper compresses the division of labor into one line, borrowed from the courtroom: expertise does the work; the public determines whether the work was done well. A jury doesn't perform the surgery, doesn't write the contract, doesn't run the audit — it renders the one verdict no specialist may render on themselves: was this right? This proposal applies the jury principle to the whole of government.
What does the signal actually measure? Not GDP, not test scores, not any index a statistician can compose — those are proxies, and every proxy is a future Goodhart casualty, corrupted the moment it becomes the target. The signal is the population's sensor reads: Do you feel society is fair? Do consequences fall equally on elites and commoners? Is everyone accountable to the same law — are the courts honest? Do you feel you have opportunity — that effort and ability are rewarded? Do you have control over your own life? Are you optimistic about the future? These sound soft. They are the opposite. As the whitepaper puts it: you can fake a GDP number, a crime statistic, a test score — you cannot fake the feeling of opportunity or fairness across millions of people. The human sensor network is the ground truth that metrics try, and fail, to proxy — and it is more than an instrument. In the biologist Michael Levin's terms it is to the body politic what bioelectric signalling, the voltage chatter cells use to agree on what to build, is to the body: the medium through which parts cohere into a self that can hold goals none of them holds alone (chapter 2). Let it degrade and a society suffers the same light-cone collapse a cancer does — the shrinking of what its parts can still coordinate on — which is why chapter 13 treats it as the load-bearing wall. GDP can rise while sensed fairness collapses; when they diverge, it is the metric that is lying.
This is why the felt questions are the terminal values of the whole design. They are not a stand-in for the thing we want; they are the thing we want. A society where people feel treated fairly, rewarded for effort, and hopeful about the future is the goal — there is no further fact behind it that the questions are approximating. You cannot optimize "people feel the system is fair" without actually making the system fairer; the measurement and the condition measured are the same thing.
That claim isn't a hopeful axiom — it has an empirical pedigree, and it's worth the short detour. In Making Democracy Work (1993), Robert Putnam studied a natural experiment: Italy stood up new regional governments in 1970 — identical on paper, same powers, same formal structure — and their performance diverged dramatically, the north's institutions working and the south's failing under the very same constitutional design. His measurement instrument was entirely subjective: civic culture surveys asking citizens whether they trusted institutions, whether they felt political efficacy, whether they believed participation mattered. Those soft questions predicted actual institutional performance better than any objective economic or demographic metric he tested against. The implication is the foundation this chapter stands on: democratic legitimacy is not a proxy for something more real — it is the real thing. Institutions people believe in function; institutions people don't believe in don't, regardless of formal design.
The design draws Putnam's conclusion as a threshold, not a slogan. A Putnam-style legitimacy instrument — does this system treat people fairly? does everyone have a genuine opportunity to be heard? does your participation actually influence outcomes? — demands a supermajority of positive response, never a bare majority. Governance that works for fifty-one percent while forty-nine percent feel unheard has not achieved legitimacy; it has merely achieved temporary control.
If the felt questions are the terminal values, then the question set is the most powerful text in the system — and chapter 1's warning applies to it with full force: whoever controls the rubric controls the population. So the goal surface is not handed down — not by founders, not by experts, not by this document. It is generated by the citizens themselves, continuously, through the same open solicitation that runs the agenda (chapter 4): anyone may propose a question the society should be asking itself, costless, and questions earn their way into the weighted instrument by the engagement they gather — while questions that stop resonating retire. The precise machinery — relevance voting, sampling, rotation cadence, versioned overlap so that old and new readings stay comparable — is a lever like the others, tuned in the search. What is not a lever is the openness itself.
That openness needs the strongest protection in the design: something close to First Amendment status for the asking of questions. No leader, no delegate, no adjudicator, and no majority may rule a question out of order, strip it from candidacy, or punish its asking. Suppressing a question is the cheapest rubric control there is — a society that cannot ask "are the courts honest?" has already answered it. Questions must still earn weight; engagement decides what the instrument actually carries. But candidacy is absolute — content-neutral, viewpoint-neutral, held at the same constitutional viscosity as the meta-rules themselves. The solicitation channel is where a society decides what it is able to notice, and it is the one channel that must never have a gatekeeper.
The corollary has teeth, and the whitepaper applies them twice. First: leaders' long-term pay is bound only to the broad did-this-work signal — never to named KPIs, the key performance indicators an organization picks to grade itself by — because any named metric that binds compensation is a Goodhart target, and a leader who nominates their own KPI will nominate a hittable proxy. Second: no leader may ever cite a metric to override public judgment. "The graphs say it's working" is not a defense against a population that says it isn't. If a leader genuinely believes a policy follows a J-curve — pain now, payoff later — the honest instrument exists: declare the pain window and a vindication test up front, and stake on it. Crying "trust the metric" is thereby made expensive when false and cheap when true, without any metric ever overriding the broad signal. Quantitative data still matters — as color, context, and diagnosis. Metrics are investigative tools. Sentiment is the governance signal.
This ordering — public verdict above expert consensus — is not anti-knowledge. It is the recognition that expert consensus is itself an institution, with an institution's incentives, and orthodoxies defend themselves like anything else that wants to survive. The observation distilled from Max Planck, the physicist whose own field resisted the quantum theory he founded — science advances one funeral at a time — is a measurement of how expensive it is for even our most self-correcting institution to change its mind; fields with less error-correction than physics do worse. History's ledger of confidently enforced expert orthodoxies that later collapsed is long, and no generation should assume its own list is finished. So expertise gets exactly the role it can be trusted with: doing the work, arguing its case in public, staking on its claims — and never grading its own homework. That is the jury principle's entire content.
One more thing rides on this design, easy to miss. Coordination systems historically smuggle their binding energy in through myth and hierarchy — the flag, the throne, the founding story — and the problem is the smuggling, not the myth. When "what we're really about" exists only as shared intuition, whoever controls the narrative controls the tribe, and norms can be shifted overnight as loyalty tests: those who track the changes prove their membership, those holding last week's position mark themselves outsiders. This design refuses the smuggling, not the culture. Part of the answer is the monitoring itself: participation is belonging — you feel part of the society because your signal demonstrably moves it; your sensor read is part of the verdict that pays, retains, or retires every law and every leader.
But a signal is not a story, and traditions fade unless they are deliberately transmitted. The honest starting point is that culture is never unset. Some myth is always propagating and someone is always doing the propagating — today, largely whoever holds the media, the universities, and the entertainment. Elite influence on culture is not the failure here, and no design will remove it: some cohort will always lead what a people aspires to, and that is close to what leadership means. The failure is that the leading has come uncoupled. The people setting a society's orientation increasingly neither live under it nor hear from those who do, and pay no price for setting it badly — culture shaped by a class the culture never answers back to.
So culture belongs on the goal surface, at least in part. The same open solicitation that lets citizens write the rest of the questions — what the society is for — also carries what it aspires to be, making orientation something the search reads and adjusts rather than something handed down beneath the mechanism's notice. Elites still lead; they are simply coupled again, leading something that can push back. The artifact this produces is a cultural charter, stating both boundaries — what members must and must not do — and orientation — what the society aspires to. You cannot violate an aspiration the way you violate a rule; orientation is the referenceable answer to where are we going? that boundaries never give, and the tiebreaker when several permissible paths diverge.