“In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.”

― Barbara W. Tuchman

We all live in pretty filter bubbles. We read hot takes from the Wire, Scroll, Swarajya and Twitter and feel enlightened, champions of the underdog, lone voices fighting for what is right against the mob and the man™. In reality, we’re hopelessly blind sapiosexuals, led by the one-eyed men and women who create the news, op-eds and riveting political fan-fiction we trust.

The guise of intellect is our pied piper, and we grovel and squeak all the way to the middle of the river.

How do we decide what may be the right information and right decision when things are confusing? At least, how do we identify a lesser evil?

Setting our Base Point

The least privileged are no better at the big questions than the new aristocrats. We have each of us arrived at our beliefs based on our personal experience of the world, which includes what others we like claim. A good chunk of it lacks any meaningful rigour. So, first, we have to acknowledge that every one of us is working within a boundary of opacities and probabilities, not certainties.

Once we do that, we can acknowledge that the mind has no real capacity to be “neutral”. It can only be forced to adjust in reluctant staccato from one set-point to another, goaded by emotions and bullied by data.

With this limitation, convincing ourselves we are neutral only makes us snobs. So, it is surprisingly healthy to accept our limitations and use our current views as a reasonable starting point, rather than forcing neutrality.

Choosing Sources and Adjusting our View

Our troubles with the media always remind me of our collective misconception of meditation: that it is a practice of detachment. A way of shutting off from the world.

Some forms are indeed the choice drug of the new-age lotus-eater, but the simplest forms are the opposite. Their essence:

1. Open our minds to the overwhelming uncertainty and cacophony of our thoughts
2. Learn to find a stable center right in the midst of it

The most common insight a meditator gains is that their mind is a self-made prison causing all the confusion, driven by a childish urge to belong rather than participate and grow. The cure is awareness, and its side effect is “detachment”– towards snap judgements, self-destructive axioms, idle prattle, and trendy mood swings.

I advocate the same approach for news.

Let us expand our palette, develop thumb rules to help catch the best stuff, and do it selfishly. Our friends and mentors, while sexy lovely people, may be catastrophically wrong, and we don’t want to sink while twerking to Chopin on their Titanic. We must first muster our self-esteem and tap into our ego to be rigorous for ourselves. Till we do that, we can forget about helping ourselves, let alone the country.

The thing is, for every “leftist” Wire article childishly attacking modi, waxing eloquent on bad history, or broadcasting ass-backwards viral negativity about things they do not understand, there’s a fantastic Wire piece on environmental issues, dalit consciousness, forgotten people or systemic breakdown that “leftist” minds are typically great at observing. For every halfwit hard-hindutva moron your most hated swarajya or opindia writer dubiously follows on Twitter, for every facepalm in human form who slides into your mentions, there’s a fantastic piece in OpIndia or Swarajya containing important rebuttals, fact-checking and analysis that it is important for us to know about and understand. For every bad idea, a misquoted good idea. For every good guy, there’s a bad guy pretending– and it is a tragedy to toss the good guy into the same overflowing dustbin because we couldn’t be arsed to make sure.

Force yourself to identify just two or three limited things that you think each demographic or “side” is good at. Ignore anything from the rest of the subjects. You’ll find that slowly, you’ll automatically expand to more topics, and a more realistic view too, and throw into clarity whom among the other side may end up being good allies.

That brings us to the next point.

Judging Character

Let’s assume we disagree with every single thing a certain person has ever done or said with regards to his work. But we also know that a very good man can make bad decisions. A highly competent person can do something shockingly short-sighted.

Clearly, our judgment of character must follow different criteria. That will enable us to look at actions case-by-case, making inferences only when earned.

But how do we judge strangers when our intuition is so untrained?

Most of us, when asked how we judge a candidate or celebrity’s character, can only come up with things we hear our peers say, or jokes and memes, sound bites from the news, and usually something about “keeping promises”.

But the truth is humans judge others based on how they look and much they agree with our ideology. Unless the person is so overwhelmingly saintly that we are forced to separate the person from their ideas that we disagree with. Once we start a war on someone, we subconsciously know we’ll look stupid if we stop and change our mind. So we don’t. We just keep scaling up till we drive ourselves mad. A fairly reliable sign of this madness is when we’re calling anyone we don’t like ‘Hitler’ or ‘terrorist’, and every minor piece of news is a sign of the end times.

There is a more humanist outlook.

Let’s start with this: we know from our own experiences that the more high-level something is, the more important low-level stuff it misses. Abstraction always comes with errors, incompleteness and a morally grey paint-job around the edges. Even the kindest CEOs face the same conflict. There are “good” things they would like to do and bad things they want to avoid. But they will end up hurting the little guy. Computer scientists experience the same phenomenon with high-level code, rather than people. We all in fact face it every day in every decision that we make.

The nature of mixed economies and big government is that there is a large failure and grievance rate to everything. We deprive one to give to the other. So when most people would say we should judge character on the ability to “keep promises”– this is a good idea, but unrealistic beyond a point. We are not electing god-kings. These are mortal humans doing impossible tasks for millions of people, in a massive, corrupt, developing country. Progress will look messy and iterative. Every one good person, with all their flaws, is getting their hands dirty trying to outsmart a hundred bad ones, and it is easy to be mistaken for one.

Many of us take the fun alternative to developing intuition– to be cynical about everyone everywhere, except ourselves. This makes for great memes and an easy way to rescue failing newspapers and stand-up careers, but it is damaging to progress. We need to vote to keep good people in power.

In India, the prime minister’s office is the most high-level role, with the largest variety of effects from decisions. It compares in power to the judiciary, in a different domain.

..and perhaps that kind of power and role should not exist. But it does, so it is important to have the right character– or at least the rightest of all the available choices.

We should remember that it’s the kind of job where no matter how brilliant your idea and execution, you will hurt or annoy someone, somewhere. Imagine the nicest, most competent, most versatile person you know voted into this kind of power. Chances are they will still mess up many things along the way. Some ground-level guys will ruin years of planning. A corrupt bureaucrat down the chain will mess up PR.

They’ll face bitter choices that no amount of character will be able to sweeten for the public eye. If they try to fight corruption and power structures, it will be replied to in triplicate, creating discord and seeding doubt in every mind. The foreign press will be happy to give extreme naysayers and conspiracies a voice, with no checks and balances. And if the leader shows weakness at any point, a single apology at the wrong place and time, the sharks will eat them for breakfast. It might pain you to see a person you know to be righteous so completely misunderstood and skewered.

It is best to imagine a person you know in this thought experiment, because it helps humble and soften our judgements of strangers. Celebrities and powerful people are humans like us. They deserve empathy as any other human does, even if we have reason to poke holes in their actions.

It is the bravery to take decisions, get hurt, and learn from them in full view of everyone that creates progress.

So, what traits can we judge candidates on (independent of their ideas)?

Perhaps we can use the universal stuff: work ethic, decisiveness, incorruptibility, how much risk they put themselves in, generosity, humility and respect (in their treatment of others), force of personality, vision, ambition, practicality, attitude towards women, ability to handle pressure, ability to make and keep good allies (inside and outside).

What else? Perhaps: flexibility towards the values of the public, how well they balance the globalism-nationalism-localism trilemma, strategic use of aggression, wisdom in inaction, frequency of petty feuding, litigiousness, criminal records (and court rulings about them), either consistency over time or the ability to change their minds (both are conflicting but valuable traits), and the specific type and quality of their greatest enemies. Last but not least, the close company they keep (like ministers, who we can judge by these same factors).

Take the example of Manmohan Singh. Our window into his gestalt is opaque, but our net view of his basic character is favourable. So once we have that out of the way, we can weigh his actions and his ability influence things. We can see that he was not able to do as much as we would have liked, apart from his momentous role in the 90s working with PV Narasimha Rao, who in turn was the co-architect of the progress we young Indians are taking for granted today. There is enough to indicate Mr.Singh may be cowardly, but that’s about all we can say. We don’t know. This a basic humility and restraint we must have. We have a starting point, and we can build on it or chip it away in a way that is earned.

In the same way, the attacks on Modi’s character were always puerile. It is possible to legitimately disagree with more than 100% of everything he has done and provide alternatives. It is possible to convince others of those alternatives, including the party itself. But since most of that precious time was spent working the angle that he’s evil and a “fascist”, the only thing it proved is that the critics were atrocious judges of character. No one is duty-bound to go spear-fishing for a fair point in a sea of trash.

These last five years could have been transformative. What we gorged on instead was junk food: endless media with the smug, conspiratorial tone of a journalism undergrad who’s just discovered Marx, and stopped reading before the plot twist about Stalin.

As Heraclitus said, “Man’s character is his fate”. We forget that the need for character applies just as much to the critic as the critiqued.

Judging their influence over their party

Across the world, even the rare genuine politicians and candidates hang around with peers they secretly despise. It could be due to a judgement call, cognitive dissonance, cowardice or malice.

What we must try to glean is: How much support the do they have in their party? How much influence do they have over its values and future? How much can we do to prop up their efforts to clean house? If we think they are good and have considerable support, that’s a point in their favour. It means there’s a chance that they (with positive/negative reinforcement from the public) will be able to take a mediocre party and force them to be great over time.

This naturally leads into judging their capacity to work and take feedback, which if we have been diligent about expanding our media palette, we will not find very difficult.

Judging our ability to mitigate risks and second order effects

There are risks with voting anyone into power– what we must try to work out is an idea of cumulative risk, second order effects (the effects created or potentiated by an effect), and our ability to mitigate them– so we can form an idea of a worst-case scenario.

Hanging around well-curated ideas feeds into our ability to judge whether the people we’re choosing are the right iterative step for the next phase of social and economic change. It’ll also help us judge how much power we as individuals and the public have as the counterbalance. This is the original purpose of the western-style mixed government used here and most of the world, that most people still believe they want.

To put it rather radically, every democratic mixed government is, on purpose, a dilute mix of: monarchy, oligarchy, aristocracy, republicanism, militarism, legalism, police state, and mob rule. Some include religion for a headier cocktail. These powers are diluted then separated, rather than junked, as an acknowledgement that they are each supposedly inevitabilities of man’s nature; to encourage in each group their best impulses, but counterbalance their worst.

The “ideal” system that most people crave is localist and federal– scaled and bounded to local cause and effect, linked by network to larger regions and networks.

So our current hacked-together system is not an amazing one to be stuck with for ever. But it is the one we have, so we must think of civilization n the long-term: as a process of bootstrapping.

As a policy, one shouldn’t pontificate about countries we don’t live in, so we’ll have to take the example of India to expand on that point.

Consider the Congress party. Voting back into power an untrustworthy, previously dishonored, scam-ridden, divisive, dynastic coalition with an amoral set of leaders, those who are likely have 70 years worth of vast unsavoury networks and promises to keep, unable to pull up the country despite more than a half-century of monopoly, and who still have no concrete views or plans– is a far larger and uncontrollable risk than almost any other conceivable choice.

The effects are wide-ranging, it is not just one or two dangerous things. It is the option of disaster, because the majority of its problems cannot be mitigated by individuals, judiciaries or the public.

Especially compared to the main alternative, the BJP, a party I myself dislike, yet who nevertheless, in a nutshell:

• Have generally shown a willingness to work and improve, at least at the highest level
• Are mostly eager to please, due to being “new”
• Have a very capable-though-arguably-flawed leader who has become the unwitting mirror for everyone’s experiences, fears, paranoias, hopes, dreams and mental illnesses
• Even with a majority, are still weak enough to be countered and altered by the public, individuals and the judiciary (as we have seen in the last five years)
• Have problems with a potentially large number of its members having backward views
• Have a bunch of as yet incomplete promises
• Have an inability/unwillingness to control extreme fringe ideologies and morons
• Have a history of bad quotes
• Potentially have a poor/dishonest attitude to data

.. but none of the last five points are unique to this party

.. and it is not uniquely responsible for intolerance and hate crime, all of which were happening before 2014 as well.

We can say certain elements in their approach took an existing thing and made it worse. But even if they weren’t to get elected again, it would still happen, and there is no convincing reason why it wouldn’t be worse from here on without them, or why we can’t involve the party themselves in solving it (they are at the moment the best suited to clean up their own act)

In short, the Congress here presents an unfixable problem. Currently, until their networks dry up and they learn all their lessons, it is suicidal to re-elect them. The BJP presents a most likely fixable problem.

To put it differently for the apple-cheeked millennials like me reading this: the BJP is, at worst, like the dynamic but staggered and unsuccessful administration of a fresh Rufus Scrimgeour.

The Congress is Gilderoy Lockhart riding Cthulhu into the Central Business District.

If our disagreements are deeply ethical in nature, it is more consistent to mass vote NOTA, though unwise from every other point of view.

Judging our Own Community

The religious and spiritual among us have always had an important suspicion about ourselves. Here, I am including those who have left a religion but still defend it as the lesser evil. Those who have joined various new age and activist cults that are little better than fundamentalist religion, please sign your name in the register!

In the privacy of our own thoughts, most of us concede: there’s some noxious stuff in our core texts, beliefs, history, and behaviour, in a way that suggests that they are not entirely divine and correct. The way the peaceful among us have dealt with it is to retcon and rationalize them to awkwardly fit the times and then turned the spotlight on everyone else.

To see this, we don’t need to be that campfire night guy smoking a blunt, slurring, “duuude, religion like, sucks, man”.

A lot of the self-serving ideas we form about history, the actions of our ancestors and holy figures, and world affairs are based on feeling defensive about rather accurate criticisms levelled at us and our “allies” by others, and also wanting to compulsively signal to our social groups that we share their views. It seemingly costs nothing to belong to any group on the internet. The problem with this low-cost signalling is that it cheapens our character. We don’t notice we’re doing it till some stopped-clock “bhakt” or “libtard” on the internet rightly points it out, which just makes us signal harder. We don’t notice the true cost of it: mental and spiritual freedom. Till one day we cross the wrong intellectual or dare to differ and the reaction is swift and unforgiving. By then it’s usually too late, you’ve already built an entire life that’s dependent on this network. Fall in line, or perish.

The division between fundamentalist religions is often based on simple hypocrisy; hypertraditionalists of all ideologies are poster boys for the narcissism of small differences. The only real differences between the views of fundamentalist Hindus, Muslims and Christians in India (and probably elsewhere) are aesthetics and the name of their god.

In every thing else– LGBT rights, parenting, women, race, foreigners, immigration, science, apologia, puritan laws, crime and punishment, an abiding love for monoculturalism– they are like brothers separated at birth.

So, the issue with re-interpreting a piece of text in sacred books or a historical precedent just to create peaceful believers is that it’s a band-aid on a bullet wound.

Reformers will eventually die, but the human love for purity, nostalgia and classical grandeur never will (these are not “bad” things, necessarily!). The original sources of every religion will always be available, forever. After fifty years of blood, sweat and tears reforming your culture and religion, some angsty young man will wonder, “have we strayed from god’s ways?”. And he will call for a return to the old, literal words. Legions of other angsty young men will gather at his feet, willing to take up arms and put down precious grey matter. And legions of women, children, downtrodden folk and innocent people will be deprived of the happy freedoms, opportunities and absurdities of our modern world.

For a longer peace, a large majority of each religion must eventually have the guts to commit to one of two conclusions, and let their behaviour reflect that commitment: either the books and past are perfect and literal, or they aren’t.

If our community’s majority picks the former, as many do, we cannot then not whine about the blowback, criticism, mockery and discrimination– and conflict, in the worst case– we receive for the various side effects and x-order effects of our beliefs. And then we should hope to god we’re right.

Alternatively, we can see it as not perfect, but deeply inspired, let it do what religion does best: fuel wisdom, beauty and culture, and leave the rest to man. The birds chirp, the flowers bloom, the sun rises and sets, we forge forwards to a mysterious future.. until our species is unceremoniously eradicated in a white-hot supernova of divine retribution.

To speak for my own community, for example: the indigenous Indian dharmas don’t have or want a final revelation, or a universally prescriptive text (arguably, excepting Sikhism). Objectively speaking, we have old fashioned ‘secularism’ built-in. Yet what we also have are poor behavioural, historical and cultural precedents, along with influential sectarian orthodox texts, which led, among other things, to a weaponized caste system. This persists deeply in certain pockets while the rest of the world has gotten rid of theirs.

Even foreign religions and invaders saw the advantage in exploiting this outdated monstrosity. To make things worse, we’ve proudly maintained the worst of the narrow morals of these ancestors and invaders. It is quite embarrassing to continue to blame imperialism, invasions, missionaries and other communities– that is, everyone but ourselves– for our lack of progress.

It would be wise for all of us to recognize the role our community’s ideologies play in creating grievances. Our collective cognitive dissonances about religion come in contact with politics and limited resources to form a sinister alchemy. We can’t ignore established grievances every time they come up. Sometimes the truth will turn out to be grey, meaning it requires compromise between groups. Sometimes, it will be stark, and we must face that– it will require generosity and grace wholly from one side, and that could happen to any side.

And sometimes, it’ll turn out some idiot manufactured a problem when there wasn’t any.

A Myth: Right-Wing vs Left-Wing

Right-wing and left-wing in the western sense of the words do not apply to india. Most parties in India are centrist, leaning slightly left or right. We make each other more stupid every time we muddy the waters with inaccurate categories– they’re convenient shorthand, nothing more.

For instance, all the things “right wing” Narendra Modi is most famous for are things western “right-wingers” would despise– Ayushman Bharat, Demonetization, GST, Aadhar, Ujwala Yojana, pushing for Digital money, and nearly every government and infrastructure program he’s ever been involved with– these are all “leftist”, “big government” ideas. These are the kind of ideas that Bernie Sanders would comfortably espouse in the US, and his critics would call him a communist for it. A party with the airs of religiousness doesn’t make them “right wing”. Your racist uncle probably supports socialized welfare and donates to charities.

Most actual indian right-libertarians and free-marketeers do not support Modi’s policies. Some support him pragmatically– for his character, and as a necessary intermediate step to whatever ideal in the future. Contrary to popular belief, a fair number of religious Hindus, Hindu fundamentalists and “Hindutva types” dislike Modi, they see him as a betrayer of their vote and a destructive modernizer, pragmatist and centralizer— and they’re right. He is in fact a “destructive” modernizing pragmatist and he is a relentless centralizer. He has absorbed that personality and approach into his Hindu beliefs and narrative. This is why most people in India support him– because most people in India want that.

India’s populace is still by and large “left” in its social values. The places it strays from this thumb rule into bigotry are usually a result of ideas seeping in from some fundamentalist crack in the wall during childhood, and are easily remedied by education, upbringing and economic growth– which have not yet reached the ideals and levels necessary for outsiders to perceive the changes.

Political paradigms cannot be imported as-is. Context matters!

We’re Missing Out

Our confusions have led so many of us to not notice that for five long years we’ve finally had a centrist government that is actually interested in doing work, for the first time since independence, and apart from 1991.

Whether they are doing it for populist reasons or not is wholly besides the point. They have big, but simple flaws that could have been ameliorated if we got involved and less of us were so apathetic and divisive when it comes to politics, law and direct involvement. This is something if we had any sense, we would have used to our advantage to get what we want, whatever our political leanings.

It is an opportunity no country in the world currently has.

Instead, we’ve wasted it being toxic argumentative adolescents on the internet, making and sharing tired political takes and painfully-safe “subversive” comedy, and indulging in conspiracies dreamed up by undiagnosed fruit loops on YouTube and WhatsApp. We think we’re special sparkly unicorns. In fact, we’re frightfully ordinary ponies with blinders and a big, dumb dunce cap glued to our heads.

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TL;DR

Our vote doesn’t end with our vote. Everyone claims they want a democracy and a mixed welfare economy, no one wants the duties and collateral damage that comes with building one in a low-income developing country.

If we really care about things beyond worthless social signalling to our peers and admirers: we must always vote out failed old guards,vote for any functioning and relatively effective newer party we think we have the best chance of changing, and then aggressively work to change them.