My 4 Year Manifesto For A Generation Of Rational 30-Somethings

I wrote this on Jan 17, 2017. I’m publishing it one inauguration later ;)

As an enlightened moderate 30-something, watching the Trump ascendancy of a complete boor and dunce to the highest office in the land and the world, I felt it emotionally appropriate to post a 4-Year Manifesto for all members of my generation today. (ed- no I didn’t, but I do now)

I see the inauguration of Donald Trump on Monday as an unavoidable slow-motion car-crash, part of an ascendant worldwide wave of systemic blundering.

As an enlightened moderate and as a person who genuinely wears different ‘thinking cloaks’ with practiced ease — I am at once a thoroughly Indian person as well as a patriotic first-generation American, consequently I concurrently hold extremely contradictory social and political positions across identities without brain-farting (yes, it’s sometimes rational for adults, even our leaders, to flip-flop lol) — I felt it appropriate to present my feelings at this cataclysmic political moment for the world and further to pitch them as a Manifesto for myself and others to rally behind.

2008 and the Great Recession were earth-shifting no-doubt, but this forthcoming period I’ve dubbed Idiocracy (2x pun because a major component of the problem today IMHO is fascist ideo-sic-cracy) is one in which the entire existing post-WW2 world order we cherish is poised to crumble.

We collectively need a toolkit to start thinking about the systems within it that need to be preserved and reformed for traditional Western principles of the Enlightenment to once again lead us globally once this dark period is over. Also we Plan B for what to do in the case that the world splinters into fractious cells unwilling to cooperate, and the superpowers of the world start acting in their own petty interests instead of following the present tradition’s general rule of spreading and upholding Free Market liberalism and Democratic values.

The fact of the matter is that no one in the world between the ages of 25 to 35, the generation that came of age with the CD-ROM and the first 28.8K internet bubble, and which I call the Rational Generation, participates in any political or action movement that is not pseudonymous. This generational abdication of ours from traditional political and civic systems is a critical contributing factor to the alt-right political crisis engulfing the world today — from Grexit to Brexit to the forthcoming Idiocracy.

Principles that need reformation:

1. Reevaluation of the profit motive
2. Imprudent cost-cutting — there has to be time for whimsical and quixotic approaches to most things, or there’s no fun and correspondingly no innovation except in cost-cutting.
3. Automation
4. Too much information
5. Too much monopoly power and network effects
6. Not enough education

Important note: There has to be time for whimsical and quixotic approaches, or you bleed the fun out of it.