The best way to predict your future is to create it.
Abraham Lincoln
The Third Option Plan: grow sustainable people from birth, train them to be social scientists, build them a lab in order to experiment with a pure form Democracy, then once it is ready, let them begin to plant it everywhere. If it is true Democracy, it will be able to grow in any environment.
Time to Shift Gears
Like the universe, each of us begins at a ‘singular’ moment of infinite potential energy and expands forward in time, with the capacity to Empower all that falls within our orbit. If we can be a source of Power for others, they would naturally gravitate toward us, but where no Power exists, there is a darkness, and it is through the isolating fear of this darkness that Control is born.
If we are to change our current societal paradigm from one of Control, which is a ‘top-down’ arrangement, to one of Power, which builds from the ‘bottom-up’, early Education must be tasked to lay the foundation for it. The Third Option wants to fashion an ‘environment’ where one’s value is based on how many people they can empower, not Control. Instead of charity being optional, selfishness would now be optional. We would strive for self-control over self-defense, self-mastery over the mastery of others. If we can be our own individual source of Power, instead of constantly draining Power away from others, we may yet evolve away from parasitism and toward some mutual arrangement with the universe. To do this, however, we will need to use our imaginations, and imagine letting go of about six million years of human baggage that like hoarders, we continue to drag behind us, slowing us down from where we need to go. We will never be able to reach escape velocity until we jettison this baggage. Humanity’s most unique feature is our higher functioning brain, which allows us to exist outside the constraints of Time; it makes little sense to possess such a brain and only use it to cling—in some needy fashion—to the past, when the present and future are potentially more inviting—at least for 99% of us.
Those in Control will of course push for ‘tradition’ and ‘independence’, because both serve their interests. Through Education, people could be empowered to instead consider what best serves their own interests. Independence is the sales pitch of predators. Individually, we become nothing more than meat. Isolated, we will either wind up prey, or by fighting this outcome, inadvertently wind up in the role of the predator. Dependence is not any better; it turns us into a herd of cattle, where we are fattened up on cheap consumerism in exchange for serving our economic purpose. The ‘third option’—Interdependence—is our best bet; to each possess the Power to take care of ourselves, but still know that ultimately, we are always going to be better together. By remaining open to collaboration, all that is needed is a plan where everyone wins. [The Third Option has just the thing.]
People come in about 7 billion different varieties, but what powers them is essentially the same: human connection. We are all born starving for air, water, sustenance and immediate attention. Those deprived of early human connection might as well be deprived of air; a constant fear—as if drowning—is created, and whether one chooses to fight or flee their way out of it, those in close proximity will be forced to suffer right along with them.
In the string theory of human interaction, the feelings that resonate within all of us—some constructive, some destructive—are what network us together. For this reason, we can no longer ignore those in ‘disharmony’ with the group. To bring us together naturally, we need to start humming a tune that everyone knows; people all like the sound of Certainty, Fairness, and Belonging. These would resonate well within People.
People are born to navigate (aka ‘adapt to’) whatever environment they must face; they will always take the best available option, based on their experiences, in order to survive. It is the task of Education to secure an environment built on the shared experiences of Certainty, Fairness, and Inclusivity; meanwhile, let us be sure to teach everyone how to ‘tread water,’ just in case the tides of Uncertainty, Unfairness, and Isolation rise up, as they occasionally are wont to do. That is The Third Option plan in a nutshell: grow sustainable people from birth, have them experiment with a pure form Democracy in the Third Option’s educational laboratory, then begin to plant it everywhere. If it is true Democracy, it will be able to grow in any environment.
The goal of education is to enable individuals to further their education.
John Dewey
Final Word
Like John Dewey, the Third Option believes that learning automatically comes from doing, and when one is doing something that truly matters, there will automatically be passion, focus, effort and reflection (in order to ‘get it right’). These are examples of the transferrable skills needed for successful mastery of any subject, and thus time must be spent teaching these habits separately. Individual passions will hopefully bring forth many of these skills, as well as the work done to fashion an emerging future they would soon inhabit.
