Curriculum Overview

Owning Citizens Dreams

A Juggler's Handbook for Governing Narratives in the Age of AI

A twelve-unit interdisciplinary curriculum — built across a textbook and four companion novels — that traces the architecture of narrative power from pulpits to platforms to algorithms, and specifies the democratic governance alternative.

How the Curriculum Works

Each unit of the textbook follows a five-section pattern: Framework (the theory), Case (the historical evidence), Neurodivergent Read (the pattern-recognition perspective), System (the AI parallel), and Convergence (where all four registers meet). Unit 2 adds a sixth section documenting the institutional evaluation failure that catalyzed the project.

The workbook pairs each unit with companion readings drawn from four novels — Confluence (CT), Reciprocity Clause (RC), The Book of Should (BoS), and Forbidden Friends (FF) — followed by discussion questions and a field exercise.

Below, Presents describes plot, case material, and narrative content. Explains names the theoretical and analytical frameworks each unit teaches.

Part I
The Ungoverned Machine
Unit 1 Narrative Generation Systems
Presents
  • The Prop 8 letter as opening case — a single page read from 1,600 pulpits that generated $20M in coordinated political action within five months
  • CT's Sterling Brothers consolidation campaign and the resistance network forming around Bill Kowalski's locked tractor
  • FF's opening chapters and excommunication narrative; RC's prologue
Explains
  • The five-component narrative generation system: generation, curation, distribution, feedback, exclusion
  • The architectural equivalence — pulpits, broadcasts, and algorithms are the same system operating at different scales
Unit 2 The Architecture Nobody Could Evaluate
Presents
  • The MOCSIE Systems diagram and the dissertation committee's inability to evaluate it
  • CT Chapters 1–3 revisited for the governance gap the resistance network cannot yet fill
  • FF's "A Restless Soul," "Finding Me," and "Too Much of a Good Thing"
Explains
  • The temporal validation argument — the specification preceded the technology that could implement it
  • The dissertation genealogy and the migration of four research papers into fiction
  • Institutional evaluation failure as case study — what happens when the architecture exceeds the evaluators' disciplinary framework
Part II
Narrative Power
Unit 3 Mobilized Bias and the Social Construction of Targets
Presents
  • The Utah Amendment (2004) — language targeting one population that captured many others
  • CT Chapters 4–6: escalation of the Sterling Brothers' tactics against resistant farmers
  • First appearance of BoS (Chapters 4–5); FF Chapters 2–4 and "Rogue Mormon Leaders"
Explains
  • Schneider & Ingram's social construction of target populations
  • Bachrach & Baratz's two faces of power and the nondecision
  • The Eisenhower Principle as methodology; algorithmic bias as industrialized mobilization of bias
Unit 4 Cultural Abidance and the Reproduction of Marginalization
Presents
  • The Ontario marriage banns — a medieval procedure performed identically for centuries, suddenly performed differently
  • Hugh's chapel moment in CT Chapter 1: discovering his fictional protagonist is gay and therefore he is
  • BoS Chapters 1–3 (ground-level phenomenology of being classified); FF Part I Sections 1–3
Explains
  • Cultural abidance — habitual performance of inherited narratives without conscious intent
  • Hugh Miller's ostensive–performative distinction; Bourdieu's habitus and doxa
  • Stivers's efficiency–effectiveness dichotomy; the four-factor cultural abidance typology
Unit 5 Terror Management and the Existential Stickiness of Narratives
Presents
  • Three votes against self-interest — the schoolteacher who voted yes on Amendment 3 and set a Thanksgiving place for the brother-in-law her vote harmed
  • CT Chapters 7–9: farm terror, escalation from economic pressure to existential threat
  • RC Chapters 12–13; BoS Chapters 4–5 revisited (terror of surveillance); FF temple and excommunication chapters
Explains
  • Becker's denial of death; Greenberg, Pyszczynski & Solomon's terror management theory
  • Symbolic immortality projects — the farm, the temple sealing, the family line
  • Existential stickiness: marginalizing narratives resist rational challenge because they are load-bearing elements of mortality-management architecture
Unit 6 Sustaining Institutions, Interpretive Monopolies, and Structural Holes
Presents
  • Three architectures of obedience — the Prop 8 letter revisited at institutional scale
  • CT Chapters 1/3/7/9 revisited: the Sterling Brothers as sustaining institution; RC "The Transparency Logs"
  • BoS Chapters 6–7; FF "Excommunication" and "Rogue Mormon Leaders" revisited
Explains
  • Completes the four-layer diagnostic: classification → abidance → terror → sustaining institution
  • Sandström & Carlsson's network structure; Burt's structural holes; interpretive monopoly
  • The graduated spectrum of shunning; the possessive pronoun test
Part III
The Displacement Framework
Unit 7 Governing Narratives and the Displacement Principle
Presents
  • Perry v. Schwarzenegger — the most thorough legal deconstruction of anti-marriage arguments in judicial history, and why the victory changed nothing structurally
  • The LDS Church's 1978 priesthood revelation as displacement case
  • CT Chapters 12–18 (resistance network as displacement operation); RC Chapters 14–16; BoS "Follow the Water Home"; FF post-excommunication chapters
Explains
  • The shift from diagnosis to strategy — why deconstruction reliably fails against the four-layer defense system
  • The displacement principle: three conditions — shared premise, performative insertion, avoidance of zero-sum framing
  • Hugh Miller's governing narratives; Hajer's discourse structuration; Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model
Unit 8 Contact Hypothesis and the Engineering of Encounter
Presents
  • The mother's PFLAG testimony — the kitchen clock, the phone receiver, the life she had imagined for her son collapsing in a single sentence
  • CT Chapters 10–15 (liberation software as contact technology), 19–24 (sustained community contact), 36–40 (parasocial contact at computational scale)
  • RC "Grant's Church"; BoS Chapters 9–10; FF Chapters 33–36
Explains
  • Allport's contact hypothesis; Aronson, Wilson & Akert's six conditions for prejudice reduction
  • Horton & Wohl's parasocial contact; Schiappa, Gregg & Hewes's parasocial contact hypothesis
  • The PFLAG react–recover–renew model; why displacement without contact is rhetoric
Part IV
The Democratic Architecture
Unit 9 Institutional Memory and the Consultable Record
Presents
  • Occupy Wall Street as institutional memory failure — extraordinary documentation dissolved for want of governance
  • CT Chapters 34–35 (Animal Farm as institutional memory), 46–47 (destruction and reconstruction), 12–13 (underground documentation)
  • RC Chapters 3–5 (the watershed as consultable record); FF Chapters 22–23
Explains
  • Geertz's thick description and the consultable record; Thayer's consensus-building small groups; Morgan's organization-as-brain
  • McGee's ideograph extended from language to media
  • The MOCSIE database specification: twelve gateways, four-tiered drill-down, protractor rating model; five components mapped to contemporary AI equivalents; Requirements 11–14
Unit 10 The Juggler — Training the Multidisciplinary Advocate
Presents
  • The PFLAG chapter president with the clipboard — a retired social worker with no title, no salary, and the relational authority to put a legislative aide in a room with three parents who had never told their stories publicly
  • CT: Hugh Lubbert as rural Juggler (Chs 4–6, 11–15), Esperanza Romero's formation (16–18), the test of trust (25, 29), Howard Andrews and the AI Juggler (48–49)
  • RC Chapters 7–9 (the Eddy — governance under pressure); FF Part I and Chapter 22
Explains
  • The six Juggler competencies: echo chamber awareness, empathy, engagement with the disconnected, campaign management, recruitment, multimedia production
  • Goleman's emotional intelligence; the central-figure hypothesis vs. the collective-thought hypothesis
  • Selznick's TVA co-optation; Farazmand's charismatic capture; Stivers's effectiveness over efficiency
Unit 11 Designing the Heterogeneous Policy Network
Presents
  • Liberty City, Miami — twenty community service programs serving the same population with no architecture connecting them
  • CT Chapters 1–15 revisited (the Driftless Area resistance network as the four-group model emerging from practice before anyone has read the specification); Ch 38 "The Network Forms"; Ch 27 (convergence as stacking)
  • RC Chapters 17–18; BoS "The Pratishtha"; FF Chapter 22 and the Liberty City appendices
Explains
  • The four-group organizational model: media, policy, operations, steering — approximately 18 people, Juggler at center, no hierarchy
  • Thayer's group-size logic; Follett's Law of the Situation; Sandström & Carlsson on heterogeneous networks; the self-funding requirement
  • Audit of every current AI governance body (all hierarchical, all concentrate interpretive authority); the stacking mechanism; Requirements 19–22, completing the 22-requirement specification
Part V
The Field
Unit 12 From Protest Narrative to Governing Narrative in the Age of AI
Presents
  • The Senate hearing room — Hart 216, the same room as Watergate — and the visual grammar of authority
  • CT Chapters 46–49: Scorched Earth, reconstruction from fragments, the election test across seventeen states, the Cascades Institute forum as stacking at full expression
  • CT 30–35 revisited (Animal Farm as governing narrative); RC Chapters 20–22 (the architecture completes itself); BoS Chapters 12–14 + Epilogue; FF Chapters 25–38 + Epilogue (the author as conversion case)
Explains
  • The Wall of Hegemony — the aggregate defense of sustaining institutions, now augmented by AI, that absorbs progressive challenges without structural damage
  • Kingdon's policy window theory; Hugh Miller's deciding moment (accumulation of hesitations); the emergent narrative community
  • The integration test: remove any single layer of the 22-requirement architecture and the result is a recognizable contemporary failure mode; the temporal urgency of the deployment-governance gap