My 11-Year-Old Came Up With a Better Government

My children used to like reading about dystopias. But now we’re living in one.

Originally published in The New York Times.

By Jake Halpern

For the last few months, my 11-year-old son, Lucian, has been busy creating his own planet.

It started as a home schooling project. I asked him to create a utopia that exists on a distant planet, where “space settlers” have formed a colony. I figured that he would see this as a chance to create his own futuristic universe, with spaceships, laser guns, cyborgs and three-headed aliens. Classic fantasy stuff.

My kids, like so many others, love this genre. They adore dystopian narratives like “The Maze Runner” and “The Hunger Games.” Anyway, I figured that — given the fact that we are essentially housebound — this would allow Lucian to have a much-needed escape from reality.

More than anything, what appealed to Lucian was writing the planet’s legal code. He became obsessed with creating a system of governance that was both efficient and incorruptible. My mom and stepdad, who helped him on this project, gave him a little primer on the American Constitution. You know, this is how James Madison did it. Lucian seemed thoroughly unimpressed, and he set out to create his own set of laws, which he called the “Consti-Lucian.”

The Consti-Lucian protects individual liberties — like freedom of speech and freedom of the press — but what it values, above all else, is solidity and constancy. There is no president, but instead a council of three leaders: the “Triumviri.” They work with a legislature to pass laws and, once enacted, the laws cannot be modified or revoked for at least three years. “This creates stability,” the Consti-Lucian notes.

The Consti-Lucian can be changed only if every single one of the government’s 15-member judiciary agrees. Upon reading this, I wondered: When was the last time that 15 judges agreed on anything? And that, of course, was the point. This code was meant to be etched in stone, which it literally was. In the center of the colony, Lucian created a public space where “the Consti-Lucian is carved into a rock slab to insure everyone’s understanding of the laws.”

His legal code is firm, but it is by no means draconian. For example, it specifically prohibits prisons. There is also an endowment for artists whose work will be displayed in the “Garden of Hope.” Lucian notes, “We are requesting for artists to submit designs for sculptures that people can see and sometimes climb on and walk into.”

Lucian’s legal code fascinated me for many reasons, but most of all because it seemed to be a direct reaction to the world around him. He is only 11, but I think he gets, on some fundamental level, that we are living in a moment when rules — for Covid-19 testing, meat processing and police conduct — are deeply dysfunctional. Lucian’s utopia is not so much Star Wars (i.e., a world of supercool, futuristic technology), but a fantasy of a world where government and laws function properly.

Everything is codified. He makes specific provisions on the number of doctors, E.M.T.s and “virus control” experts who must be on the government payroll. Even when I asked him to focus on other aspects of the planet — like writing a diary from the point of view of an ordinary citizen — he wrote about a fisherman who was unhappy with the way that property was being distributed.

Perhaps none of this should surprise me. Up until recently, my children grew up in a predictable world ruled by school bells, sports schedules, music lessons and a government that was (or at least seemed) fairly competent. Under those circumstances, it makes perfect sense that they would love dystopian narratives like “The Maze Runner,” where the world has gone to hell and all the old rules have been tossed out the window. But nowadays, we are essentially living in a dystopian narrative, and my kids are left to fantasize about a far more banal world, where the rules simply work.