An Introduction to The Forward Wing

I write this from a place of optimism tinged with a hint of fear. I look out at the world and I see how modern technology and the internet have brought about the most accelerated phase of human progress. I look out at the same world and I see things that break me. On one side, we have the internet connecting thoughts and ideas like never before — spurring progress and innovation to the point where we have allowed so many to become gods — with every single whim and every single need catered to at the touch of a button. On the other side we have crippling poverty, shameless corruption, blatant injustice and divisive intolerance.

It is madness and perhaps it has always been.

History has taught us that in the balance between the morally abstract yet universally understood maxims of ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’, humanity as a whole has slowly crawled towards the ‘Good’ of an ever-progressive and equitable future with each successive generation. We live in the best possible time in the known history of the world — with human knowledge and innovation permeating across populations at unprecedented scale and speed. This is where my optimism comes from.

The fear though, that dreaded little voice, comes from the fact that for the first time in human history — “The rate of change of human technology has completely surpassed the rate of change of human society.” The world is changing faster than a generation is replaced, and this has led us to a tipping point of monumental proportions. With the internet catalysing the spread of ideas and products, everything little thing you could imagine about human society and individual lives could change in unprecedented ways on ever-reducing timescales. For the first time ever, more than half the world — a staggering 4.5 billion human beings — can seamlessly connect to each other across the internet.

‘The butterfly effect’ has never had a more fertile playing ground than the internet-connected world of today. The same world where self driving cars and gene editing are at the very edge of possibility is the same world where 160 of the wrong characters on twitter can trigger a nuclear apocalypse. The internet has soaked the world in fuel — it would be unwise not to fear the sparks of madness that may light it all up.

Collectively, many of us have assumed the roles of gods and devils towering over an endless stream of humans who have not had the opportunities we’ve had. The best of us can create a beautiful utopia where every child is provided the safety and guidance they need to grow up and become individuals capable of contributing to their fellow humans, as they themselves peacefully search on towards their self actualisation — all this in a world of progress, technology and convenience. The worst of us can burn it all and create a dystopia where the corrupt feed their own brokenness by desecrating the future of each child with their twisted interpretations of state and religion — all this in the same world of progress, technology and convenience.

In this modern age of possibility, everything is truly possible.

Somewhere in the middle of this, most of us who can access and read this — have just chosen to look the other way. The world is too much for us to make sense of. It is much easier to work the days, and escape away the nights. It is incredibly hard to make sense of what the world is — with its endless spectrum ranging from poverty stricken children to self-righteous billionaires. We are the silent majority, aren’t we all? The sheep of the world caught between the fringes of inhuman hate. We just simply read and consume and ‘like’ and ‘share’ and press more buttons, or talk to more voice assistants — as the world burns itself on one side and builds a paradise on the other.

We cannot do this any longer.

Switching gears to the political reality of the modern world — We have left behind the time of kings and lords, and now we base the world on nation states. Let us first accept that this is what the world is. Within this world, two fundamental battles are fighting for supremacy and moral authority in how we govern ourselves as nations.

We are divided into two schools of thought — We are either democracies or autocracies.

• The Democracies — If we succeed, we prove that each child is born with an innate potential for ‘Good’. We prove that “If all citizens have an equal say in their own state, the nation progresses”.
• The Autocracies — If they succeed, they prove that humans are beyond repair. We have failed as a species. Only the ‘privileged best of us’ — those who ‘deeply understand some holy book’ , or have simply seized power for themselves— must rule over all others for the nation to progress.

I am unabashedly rooting for the democracies of the world. If you can read this article, I hope you would as well. Politics is assuming an increasingly global context in the internet world. The same trends of right-wing ultra-nationalism and left wing ultra-stupidity have almost succeeded at removing the last vestiges of hope from our modern democratic nations.

From the US to the UK to India to Brazil — any political analyst worth their salt will spot the same polarising trends within the citizens of these large democracies— there is more hatred than progress. It is obvious across the world that unfiltered access to the internet has amplified the wrong voices on social media. The same social media which heralded the age of information has conveniently forgotten to regulate itself with a moral compass. It now monotonously preaches equality of speech yet sells a ‘bigger voice’ to any political party willing to pay money to those apathetic false angels on their Silicon Valley thrones. As mentioned earlier, the internet connects everyone. Everyone has a voice on the internet — this is an incredible milestone for humanity. We can use this as the base for all optimism in this world — the fact that we have access to each other and we have all of human knowledge so readily available.

Unfortunately, the gatekeepers of social media have tilted the balance to shore up their balance sheets — everyone does have a voice in principle, but as an ordinary human being, unless you ‘buy your reach’ with ‘digital advertising’, your voice is even more suppressed than ever before by the ad-revenue churning ‘feed and search algorithms’. The social media and internet tech companies must self regulate with a 50 year worldview. It would be immoral to solely focus on the quarterly earnings reports since this values shareholders disproportionately at the expense of the future of humanity. Failing to self regulate and stem the flow of ‘Evil’ shepherds on social media will be the death knell for the democracies of the world. An internet that truly provides an equal voice to all the citizens in a democracy is our last hope for a technology powered, equitable and sustainable worldview of the future.

This brings me to the next gear — The prominent democracies across the world have been hijacked by the the extremists of our society. The Right and the Left — both hyper charged on hateful vitriol across social media with no space for the other side to be considered as a fellow human being. The internet has created incredibly effective mechanisms for the spread of hate and intolerance across both the Right-wing and the Left-wing. The shepherds on these fringes have divided the democracies into two increasingly polarised groups.

It is a heavy irony that most democracies have been effectively reduced to two choices, neither of which is looking at solving the correct set of problems for the world at this point of time. The modern day Right and Left wings will collectively ensure we never move forward, and that is all that their legacy would be in the history of humanity.

The contemporary Right and Left wings have monopolised one side of the debate on every single topic — from corruption, to immigration, to religion to every other damned thing that makes one group of humans have opinions which are different from the others. We have no space in our modern democracies for a man or woman who looks at both the Right and the Left objectively and decides that each can be correct about a different set of things. We have no space for rationality — No, our democracies have been reduced to nothing more than animal courts with just two extremist choices that the sheep are forced to choose between. This is leading us to a point in human history where democracies are proving themselves wrong. Instead of focussing on the right questions, we now focus on squabbling over the ‘right answer’ to increasingly irrelevant and divisive questions centred around the assumed superiority of one belief system, religion, race or culture over the other.

How did this happen? — After all the fights for equality and universal voting rights, we now have an average of 40% of eligible adults who do not care enough to even vote once in a few years. After all the philosophy and knowledge of the world has been made accessible to more than half of humanity with internet connections and devices — we still decide our democratic elections with fake news and manipulative narratives.

This must stop.

Across all the major democracies, the numbers are similar. The ultra Right has 5–10% of the voters, The ultra Left has 5–10% of the voters. The remaining 40–50% of the population who do vote, do so for the lesser evil between the two and swing between them from time to time. All this while, the 40% who don’t vote just sit there within their dreary lives — lamenting the lack of political choices — never realising that if they somehow consolidate their 40%, they can make anybody win elections [truly anyone, which should inspire them to become or create a new wave of political discourse]. My optimism in this polarised Right-Left world lies on the hypothesis that 80–90% are not hardcore left or hardcore right, but choose one of the two (or neither) due to the lack of a better political alternative.

Within this madness of the Right wing and the Left wing — where we can’t find any side worth choosing, perhaps we can use the greatest democracy of the world, the Internet, to start and grow a movement advocating an alternative — “The Forward Wing”. This can perhaps represent an internet-first, global aggregation of policies, political philosophies and world views that truly represent the choices of the silent majorities of ‘Good’ citizens in every democracy — and finally rid our democracies from the fringe elements of hate and ‘Evil’.

The Forward wing is a movement based on these 5 incorruptible guiding principles as its philosophical and intellectual foundation-

• Morally —
  — Only find a common understanding of ‘Evil’. Define only the set of things a human must not do. Codify this set of activities as the law. This must be the limit of the law; To prevent damage to the Earth and to fellow humans.
  — Let each man, woman and child find their own version of ‘Good’ and their own interpretation of “How to be good” and how to live purposeful lives. Let each of them become a Nietzschean super-man.
  — No state, No religion and No individual should be able to impose their interpretations and beliefs on their fellow humans.
  — The rights of the individual to his/her own interpretation of ‘Good’ supersedes all other authority as long it is not a part of the common ‘Evil’.
• Spiritually —
  — Start with a common baseline of what we can know for sure as limited human beings and what we can’t, which is a First Principles approach to religion.
  — All we know for sure is we are born, and we will die. We can observe ‘how’ reality works, but never understand ‘why’. Once we accept this, we can then choose our own religion, belief or atheism without any interference from the state or fellow human beings.
  — We must accept that no man can assume authority on the existence of god. No religion can claim a monopoly over god.
  — Most importantly, if the world has 7 billion people, it must have the space and tolerance for 7 billion interpretations on the nature, existence and purpose of god and of religious beliefs — all under the limits of the common law.
• Politically —
  — A conscious and completely participative democracy is the end game. Democracy is the only choice. Each generation of humans must have the right to determine their lives, with the moral goal of leaving the world a better place for the next generation.
  — No form of autocracy can be tolerated. Doing so would be to admit the great defeat of humanity — to accept that humans, if left to themselves, would do nothing else but destroy each other and the world.
  — Internet aided education and a social fabric that leverages the non- ‘Evil’ within human traditions, cultures and religions, must raise children to be ‘Good’ humans who are also made aware of their sacred duty and responsibility towards political awareness and participation. A philosophically aware democracy is the only path for sustainable and equitable progress.
• Economically —
  — A capitalist top to push innovation, with a socialist bottom to provide every human with the opportunity to work for a dignified living. If a human being is willing to work somewhere around the oft-cited 40–50 hours/week, they must not need to further worry about basic food, shelter, clothing or opportunity. If we apply all the technology in the world in the right direction, this is no longer a Marxist utopia but a reality that could be as close as another decade or less.
  — We must be socialist and human enough to provide our fellow humans an “as-equal-as-possible” opportunity at a dignified living, including education and healthcare.
  — On the other side, the creators of the world must still be given an economic incentive to innovate, within ethical and moral boundaries. This will become more equitable by allowing the internet to further equalise access to knowledge in unprecedented ways — so that we can truly live in a world where the rich will still exist, but most of them will deserve it by virtue of the impact from their creations. A politically and socially conscious world will strive to guide the humanity in these creators towards giving back most of their wealth to the state rather than to their progeny.
  — The greatest enemy to equality in the modern world is inheritance and this must be combated with moral arguments towards legal boundaries that would tax inheritance much more than income.
• The Individual —
  — The primary purpose of the individual is to Create more than they consume.
  — The individual must Protect their creations as well as their fellow humans’ right to create.
  — The individual, via the instruments of law and the state, must also strive to Destroy the ‘Evil’ inherent in some fellow humans who have not risen beyond their primitive impulses to nobler pursuits within their lives.

The Forward wing is not an agenda, it is a philosophy. It is not the idea of one person, it is the culmination of an education received via the internet by taking on the burden of reading the work of the thinkers and creators across history. The Forward Wing will progress as the world progresses, with the internet propagating locally relevant political and social interpretations based on the 5 guiding principles to serve as an intellectual and moral base upon which new politics can begin to build.

#TheForwardWing is an internet first movement which democracies and humans around the world can rally around to create a choice that they can believe in. Please use this hashtag to form a common thread for any further discourse based on the 5 guiding principles.

This is a shout to the abyss I see in myself. This a call to action towards the ‘Good’ in all my fellow human beings, especially the creators — the supermen and superwomen of the world. This is an uncertain but hopeful voice in the dark. If you read this and it makes sense to you— please join, shape, share and create #TheForwardWing