Live Like a Citizen: 8 Ways to Change your Mindset and Our Country

Summary

A spiritual guide to creating hope and healing in American civic life.

We live in a time of fracture and lost faith. But most Americans don’t want this feeling. Most of us, the exhausted majority, want to be invited into something better. That’s the call of Live Like a Citizen: to give everyone the tools to turn away from the resentment and cynicism eroding democratic life. To turn toward a healthier way of living together. Eric Liu, CEO of Citizen University, gives readers eight deep practices for rekindling our belief in democracy—and our own humanity.

Each chapter centers on a single verb—an elemental civic way to be and to be with. Through powerful stories of Americans from many backgrounds, we learn anew how to:

1. See: Seeing too quickly makes us manipulable by algorithms and exploitable by politicians. We’ve got to retrain our eyes to stop making three-dimensional humans as flat as our screens.

2. Listen: Listening can’t solve everything—but nothing can be solved without listening. We’ve forgotten the transformative civic power of making someone feel truly heard.

3. Feel: We will learn how to practice civic joy, civic love, and civic grief. To face ourselves so we can face each other. To make pain into a bridge rather than a moat.

4. Join: Joining is more than lurking on the sidelines or being “alone together” online. It is finding purpose by committing to others, in person and in place, over and over.

5. Fight: We don’t need fewer arguments. We need fewer stupid ones. When we argue to understand rather than to win, we make relationship possible. Fighting like a citizen means fighting like we must live together perpetually.

6. Change: You cannot truly change another person’s mind unless you are willing to change your own. And you cannot change it unless you know your own mind and learn the minds of others—and resist being too sure you’re right.

7. Imagine: Civic imagination is a powerful force—but it can be used to harm as well as heal. Imagining a shared future in our diverse society is therefore a practice—and an imperative.

8. Commit: When we live out these habits of heart and mind, we are creating a new culture of commitment—to one another, and to the purposes of our continuing revolution.

Democracy works only if enough of us believe democracy works. Live Like a Citizen will give you reason to believe—and the tools to transform belief into everyday action.