So we have the Doomsday Clock all set up for weekend ruminations and becoming an extra topic for the pundits. Knock Donald back a few pegs. Stoke up a little paranoia, how 'bout it? Well, Triadic Philosophy is hardly original but it does feature a simple answer to the doomsday clock story. It is called nonviolence. And there is a slight Speed Bump to get over before we simply add doom to things we would happily ignore. The speed bump is how we can actually get anything significant done. Triadic Philosophy has a way.

We must move from our binary presuppositions to the actual reality we live with.

In that reality, we all have the freedom to choose among the values that create history. As you know, some binary individuals, mesmerized by Cold War logic, created the whole doomsday train. Atomic Scientists got into the act. Like Haloween and Amazon, the doomsday clock has simply mushroomed. Enter Triadic Philosophy.

A little exercise

Imagine you are being berated face to face by a fundamentalist preacher who had no breakfast and is livid and loaded for bear. He is berating you as a sinner prone to the most invidious lusts, the most dastardly thoughts, the worst fantasies, the most disgusting scenarios, and so forth and so on. Got that?

Now brace yourself. That fundamentalist blowhard is only speaking the truth.

As free people, we are a spectrum of everything, from the pinnacle of goodness to the cesspool of the very worst of evils.

All we need to do is recognize this and we have taken the vital first step in making nonviolence the way of the world. We are in control.

Evoking values within us can set things in motion to fix things. They are stars that guide us.

We have no impulses that are fixed bad or good. All can be put in the service of choice.If we choose nonviolence, we are nonviolent. If we message and represent and advocate nonviolence. it will spread as a doable option.

Facing down doomsday

The top headline on the embedded doomsday dispatch from NPR manifests the evident belief that saying something will prevent it from being so or scare people into acting.

My headline would be more like what I am saying here. Taking the doomsday clock to be the sum total of our past allegiance to violent solutions, I make it the sign we are considering. The two further stages of triadic thinking are ethics and aesthetics.

The ethical take

Ethics submits the sign to three universal action values, tolerance, helpfulness, and democracy.

Tolerance? We clearly tolerate the fact of doomsday as an idea. I must assume the sign is a spur to creating nonviolence. Because the doom is real and palpable, doing something to stop it is also on the table.

The damage from nuclear disaster is intolerable both to ourselves and all other living things including wildlife and oceans. Tolerance gives us the flexibility to wrap our minds around nonviolence as an option not just for civil rights folk (I was one of those) but for ordinary people (I am one of those too).

Helpfulness makes nonviolence a no-brainer. The savings from ending our war footing and our nuclear fixation are at least half what we now spend. They could create prosperity with a simple understanding. The most profitable enterprises are education and enablement. Trade nukes for the training all need to adjust to a world very different from that of today. Of course, the ravages of war and nuclear wasteland prospects are regressive in the extreme. It means that to help we need to double our commitment to seeing that such carnage never occurs.

I will complete this thought process in the next article.
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