I would not dare call my thinking Triadic Philosophy if I believed I was not on the side of history. Unfortunately for Donald Trump, it’s not his future I am talking about. It is a future that is universal, inclusive and that is based on values that uplift all people.

Stopping long enough to understand what triadic means is a good starting point. Triadic means that you integrate ethics and aesthetics into thinking about what you will say and do. It means not getting sucked into binary Action where you are simply following a crowd or assuming it’s your way or the highway.

Assuming triadic openness, a platform for the future consists, I believe, of some general directions. I don’t presume that these ideas will be accepted without criticism. But I do assume that they reflect the premises of tolerance, helpfulness, and democracy that underly the ethics of this way of living.

Nonviolence

The first plank is nonviolence. This zaps the binary notion that nonviolence is an elite activity. It is actually a universal mandate. We are all capable of the worst, the most disgusting, the most guilt-producing. We need to accept that as the price of being free. We have the choice to go up or down in the hierarchy of good and evil.

The second plank is Basic Income.

Basic income is no particular existing plan. It is in my view a call to create a sort of global insurance that gives everyone alive the understanding that he or she can enjoy a life free of want, with health and the means to learn and grow readily available.

Double take-down

The third plank crushes two invidious binaries. It erases the divide between who we are and what we do, in other words between personal and business or professional.

And it erases the polarity between the very wealthy and the poor. It insists that individuals have a more level playing field and that businesses and persons play by the same rules. This has many ramifications that I will spell out as we proceed.

Cybercommunities

A most dangerous binary is the notion that how we live in our actual totality does not determine how the world goes ecologically.

Many see this and have moved forward. But we live in a world where the President of the United States (at this writing) is perfectly content to ravage the environment and perpetuate fossil fuels. We see whole coastal areas ravaged. If he is allowed to persist, conditions will only become worse.

We need to live differently big time, not with tiny incremental adjustments. This plank is a call to move beyond current notions of how we live to car-free settlements where there is enough density to make business profitable and enough grass-roots governance to give individuals control over how they will live.

This sketch will be filled out as articles unfold.

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