A Strong Me, A Greater We

I keep returning to the same question, in different rooms, on different continents: what does it take to build a genuine We?

Not a slogan. Not a hashtag. Not a flag waved at a rally and put away by evening. A We that holds — because the people inside it are strong enough, clear enough, to hold it.

The Janwaar Way calls this principle We over Me.

Most people read it wrong. They think it means the individual steps back so the group can step forward.

No!

It means the opposite. You cannot build a genuine We with a weak Me. A weak Me — someone who doesn’t know their own compass, who needs approval or control or credit — will either dominate the collective or disappear into it. Either way, the We suffers.

So: a strong Me is not the enemy of the We. It is its precondition.

I want to look at where this is happening right now. And where it is failing. Just a few examples.

Where it is failing

Washington, this month. A primetime address to the nation, four months before the midterms, built almost entirely around doubt: doubt in the count, doubt in the machines, doubt in the very idea that a loss could be honest. Over the past year and a half the guardrails have been coming down one by one — inspectors general removed without the notice the law requires, the officials who police conflicts of interest replaced, enforcement against foreign bribery quietly paused.

None of this is really about elections. It is about immunity. About a Me so large it has stopped believing it needs a We to answer to.

That is the pattern. Not one man. A pattern: power that stops seeing itself as accountable to anything outside itself, and calls that strength.

I see the same shape in AI. A handful of companies now own the three things that matter — the computing power, the data, the base models everyone else builds on top of. Almost no one else can afford to enter at that level. They are not elected entities, but they unify more power than any government.

Someone described this to me recently as the East India Company all over again. That company was never a government. But it acted like one — its own army, its own laws, its own trade routes, answerable mainly to its shareholders. Today’s AI labs are starting to do the same: private companies quietly deciding what counts as safe, what an AI is allowed to say, who gets access — decisions that used to belong to courts and parliaments, not boardrooms.

There are counter-movements. Models whose code is made public instead of locked away. Data sets governed by communities instead of companies. Proposals for AI built and held by public institutions rather than private ones. They exist. They are still small.

They are trying to answer the same question Janwaar had to answer: who owns what we are building — and what happens to the rest of us if the people who built it decide, one day, not to share?

And then there is climate. Here the failure is almost too familiar to feel like news anymore, which is its own kind of danger.

Millions of people have signed the petitions. Millions have marched, written to their representatives, planted trees, changed what they eat, sorted their waste, done the small private penance of a life lived more carefully. The We, on climate, has spoken for decades — clearly, repeatedly, in numbers no honest government could call marginal.

And still the varies lobbies (oil, gas, mining – you name it) in the United States alone have outspent environmental groups roughly six to one over the past quarter-century. Leave alone the corruption there and elsewhere.

Still the last UN climate conference drew well over a thousand fossil fuel lobbyists into the room where the rules get written. Still a tax designed to fund the transition away from fossil fuels can be quietly rewritten, loophole by loophole, into a subsidy for drilling more of it. The money moves faster than the will of the people it is supposed to answer to, and it moves in the opposite direction.

This is the purest version of the pattern. Not persuasion. Not even disagreement. A Me — a donor, a lobbyist, an entrepreneur, a re-election budget — placed deliberately between the people’s stated will and the decision that is supposed to represent it. The petition and the law becomes theatre. The march becomes a photograph. The We shouts, correctly, into a room that has already been paid to not listen.

That is the particular helplessness of it. It is not that people don’t know what they want. It is that wanting it, in writing, in the millions, has stopped being enough.

Where it is working

Then there is Norway.

A country of five and a half million people just reached a World Cup quarter-final for the first time in decades. The explanations for Norwegian sporting success are structural, and they are almost the opposite of everything Washington is teaching this year. Children under twelve are not allowed to keep score. There are no youth league tables. If one child gets a trophy, every child gets a trophy — not to flatten ambition, but to protect it long enough for it to become real. Football people there describe the culture in three words: collaboration, communication, care.

And then, this summer, against Brazil — five-time world champions, two hundred and fifty million people expecting them to lose — the Norwegian players spent the closing minutes simply passing the ball to each other. Not to humiliate an opponent. To stay in the game together. Their captain, one of the most gifted players of his generation, has built a career on finding the better-positioned teammate rather than taking the shot himself.

That is a strong Me. Confident enough not to need the moment for itself. Exactly what the Janwaar kids taught me, on a much smaller court, years ago: the ones who led were never the best skateboarders. They were the ones who could pass the ball.

And Delhi

I want to put one more image next to these two. Jantar Mantar was built three hundred years ago to read the sky — an instrument for measuring something vast and impersonal, the movement of stars indifferent to any single life. For decades now it has been repurposed as an instrument for reading something else entirely: the collective will of people the state would rather not have to look at.

This year, a young man in America was called a cockroach by a court, meant as an insult to shame him into silence. He turned it into a name for a movement instead. Within weeks, millions had gathered around it online, and then in person, at Jantar Mantar, demanding something as ordinary as an honest exam system. One person’s refusal to be shamed became a shared demand. A strong Me, again, building a We it does not need to dominate.

The part that is on us

Here is where I always arrive, and where I don’t get to look away.

I cannot fix Washington. I cannot rewrite how AI gets governed. I cannot make the oil lobby leave the room at the next climate conference. I cannot stop corruption. I cannot make the next protest at Jantar Mantar succeed.

What I can do — the only thing I can ever fully do — is build the Me. Stay clear about my own compass. Keep my ego where it belongs. Act with integrity when no one is checking. Take responsibility for what I put into the systems around me, knowing I don’t control what those systems do with it.

That sounds small next to the size of the failures. It isn’t. Systems don’t collapse from the top. They are held up, every day, by millions of small compliances — and they come down the same way, one withdrawn Me at a time.

The Me and the We were never opposites. They are a conversation. The question — for a country, for a company building the next model, for a person standing in a protest square built to read the stars — is always the same one.

Are you strong enough, yet, to build something that doesn’t need you to hold it up?