The words tolerance, helpfulness, democracy, and non-idolatry are familiar. The ideals of freedom, love, and justice are well-known. But true progress has been elusive because our premises have been wrong.
The premises of our past have been binary – explaining everything as two sides only. Rational-romantic, transcendent-immanent, liberal-conservative, war-peace. Binary is an intellectual and cultural habit. It is easy to do and fatal to Human Progress.
Reality is all sides of everything. Add in everything we do not yet know, think, or imagine. Embrace our fallibility.
Accept our need to move ahead with care. We need a new premise based on universal values. We need ethical signposts that tend toward Truth And Beauty
Reality, ethics, aesthetics
Seeing things in twos splits reality. We need a triadic way of thought that moves from reality through ethics to aesthetics,- We need ethical input and aesthetic outcomes. Our lives should be expressions and actions that create and enhance well-being.
I listen to would-be philosophers almost every day dutifully treating systems, theories and individual thinkers as though understanding them would be the key to everything. I despair at this cul-de-sac tendency. We live in a fragmented, corporate-oriented intellectual wasteland.
The box persists
Much of today’s talk is not heard or understood because we are so locked into boxes, some simplistic, others dauntingly complex. We need to say a definitive sayonara to the binary box.
My books are an articulation of triadic philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, and ideas about the city and ending violence. I see the triadic way as the key to global progress.
Triadic thinking is always underway and at work for the actual salvation of humankind. This is the time when it should become universal.
A triadic approach
We cannot continue to see only two sides of everything. We need a triadic, relative, open approach which accepts science as our fallible truth teller. As noted, the truth is grim because we have watched binary courts give to corporations the rights of human beings, We see political parties flaunt ethics and aesthetics as they serve their corporate masters.
But we will overcome. Good values are the heart of progress.
It may cost us as much as the American Revolution cost the colonists, if not in blood, then in suffering and struggle. But our aim is a non-violent democratic revolution. We shall rebuild the world as an equal opportunity field for all.
Universal messaging
We'll win by spreading messages universally with the same words embedded in them all. It's a small vocabulary that contains the goals of the revolution Triadic Philosophy embodies and represents.
Our ethics are tolerance, helpfulness, and democracy, all based on non-idolatry, Our aesthetic is truth and beauty fused. Our ideals are freedom, love, and justice. These ideals are impossible if they are not unified in the mind of each person.
There can be no true freedom. love or justice without the other two.
Review: Greta Gerwig’s ‘Lady Bird’ Is Big-Screen Perfection https://t.co/wOhhD2h8Z8
— Stephen C. Rose (@stephencrose) November 2, 2017
Always present
This philosophy already exists and is responsible for all the progress that has ever remotely approached the aim of ultimate reality which is goodness. It is in all the words above insofar as they have played a part in getting us to where we are right now.
When I say bring on the progress, I mean goodness. Send these words out. Make this our century.
