The Third Option

What We Believe

We believe that:

• all people have been equally created. What happens to them after that depends on the environment they have been forced to navigate. Unfortunately, not all environments have been created equal.
• for people to live together, as a ‘society’, they must share a common environment; if people are forced to navigate different terrain, they will invariably adapt in different ways, and eventually conflicts will arise, such as we are currently witnessing. In order to fashion a ‘common environment’ that all people would accept, it would need to be based on concepts fundamental to all people. For this reason, a rudimentary understanding of ‘human nature’ is required.
• the entirety of ‘human nature’ is based on our struggle to make Certainty out of the Uncertainty each of us feels. People will grasp onto whatever provides feelings of Certainty, and through trial and error, have fashioned belief systems and survival strategies designed to minimize Uncertainty within the various environments they have been forced to navigate.
• nothing calms our feelings of Uncertainty more than Belongingness, in all its forms; conversely, nothing stings more than ‘not belonging’. Whoever ‘doesn’t belong’ will invariably end up belonging somewhere else—likely with others who have been similarly shunned—and form the kinds of factions that now divide us as a nation.
• society, in order to be sustainable, must be built on Fairness. Unfairness makes people feel like they don’t belong, because they are not being equally respected or valued; this in turn makes them feel Uncertain about society in general. Trust issues are corrosive in any relationship; people need to trust their society for this relationship to remain stable.
• Conflict is unhealthy for people, whether it festers inside us or within the relationships we inhabit; if conflict is not resolved, the cancerous acidity of it will slowly eat us alive.

We believe it is time to upgrade our socio-economic and federal government operating systems. We have gone $29 trillion over-budget attempting to cover for the systemic flaws in our current operating system; meanwhile the cancerous acidity of it slowly eats us alive. 2.3 million of our citizens are in cages. Another $4 Trillion in healthcare is needed, just to keep the rest of us functioning. Pollution, violence, poverty, homelessness, war, welfare –each negative externality is a signal that systemic conflict exists; the growing financial cost of it directly measures how much the cancer has grown, and it will only continue to spread if the conflict is not resolved. Using a minimally invasive procedure, The Third Option could transplant a new operating system that would shrink the cancerous elements of Un-Certainty and Un-Fairness, then suture all our fates back together, to allow natural regeneration of the tissue that binds us each to the other, per our Need to Belong. We would still need to break up generations of relational scar tissue built up from the toxic affiliations our predecessors have forged—and we continue to preserve— through our current system.

Be prepared for a more Sustainable form of Certainty, Fairness, and Inclusivity, at one-tenth the cost of the current model. We believe that deep down, you always knew such an arrangement was possible; that somehow, we could all work for a livable wage, live in a safe ‘environment’, and have an affordable life. In Democracy’s Version of Capitalism, each Life is valuable; everyone can exercise Liberty without depriving anyone else of theirs, and pursue a more self-actualized form of Happiness, instead of always having to purchase some cheap consumerist knock-off of it.