DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
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User ID: 460
Note: this post is about abstract and applied philosophy.
Value is that which people are drawn towards, and economically, which people are willing to trade other things of value for.
In Triessentialism, which I’ve described elsewhere, I’ve identified three four qualities of value, plus their opposites:
- Utility, which enables the pursuit of goals, and hassle, which impedes the pursuit of goals. Other writers attempting to quantify these have suggested measuring positive and negative “utils.”
- Enjoyment, the experience of having sensations and pseudo-sensations, and unpleasantness which is not enjoyed. Other writers attempting to quantify these have suggested measuring positive and negative “hedons”.
- Esteem, known in various cultures as status, honor, face, standing, etc., and disdain as a suggested general category for the negative. While some writers have lumped this in with hedons, I see esteem as something as different from experiences as magnetism is from gravity. Esteem, like magnetism, is polar; your esteem in your ingroup rises as it falls in your outgroup, and vice versa, someone beloved by your outgroup will be hated by your ingroup. This is obvious in the culture war, but less partisanly, with how punks and hippies reveled in being seen as weird or dangerous by upper and middle class society. I suggest measuring this in “estons.”
- Agency, the ability or authorization to cause or withhold action, and its opposite, constraint. People and mammals who do not feel their agency to choose will struggle against their constraints inversely to how inevitable or inescapable the constraint seems. I suggest measuring this in “freedons”.
I believe that the util/hedon dichotomy is an insufficient economic model of the world, and that Triessentialism’s util/hedon/eston/freedon model can rehabilitate the increasingly creaky Homo economicus idea.
As to their Triessentiality:
- Utility is the How, the Logical aspect of value
- Enjoyment is the What, the Physical aspect of value
- Esteem is the Why, the Emotional aspect of value
- Agency is the Moral aspect of value, at the center of the triple-circle Venn diagram of What, How, and Why.
These fundamental categories and the Venn nature of Triessentialism suggests three additional constructed categories of value as the junctions of What/How, How/Why, and Why/What.
note: I have edited this since posting. “Agency” replaces the earlier weaker word “choice”, and at the suggestion of Bing chat, “Enjoyment” replaces the clinical “experiences”. I have also reclassified the What and Why at the end.
There are three types of thing: physical, logical, and emotional.
There are three types of stuff: power, truth, and reasons.
There are three rule-sets: differentiation, interaction, and sequence.
There are three essences: What, How, and Why.
Nothing else can even be imagined by humans. Everything is constructed from these three.
I've always been fascinated with logic. I still remember reading about Boolean logic in a childrens' science encyclopedia, and thinking it was the most sublime thing ever. In high school, learning Pascal, and then C++, allowed me to interact with logic on a far deeper level than ever before. It was the perfect thing, the gorgeous and spiritual thing, the unsullied thing. I wanted everything to be as perfect as logic. But the people around me were illogical, and it turned out even I was illogical, ending up writing stories on my computer until all hours instead of doing my college classwork. It was as if my decisions had already been made for me, despite me wanting to do what was right. I fell out of college and landed a job as a dishwasher.
I applied my skills of logic to my own emotions, observing where they came from and what they made me do. I found interesting patterns, and found some solutions to my negative emotions. But one realization in late 2000 or early 2001 changed my life: logic and emotion are two entirely different types of things, in the same way the physical is completely different from logic. You can't freeze an equation into a plasma, or melt anger into a solid. They are made of different "stuff", to use a physical metaphor. And I couldn't think of any concept which didn't refer to something made of one of these three things: power, truth, or reasons.
I started applying this "three-thing" to everything I could think of, and found it was a key to understanding anything.
I applied the "three-thing" to the famous six questions of journalism, and they collapsed down to three categories:
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"What happened?" Answered by a physical event, such as a wedding, or a car wreck.
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"How did it happen?" This asks for the process, the logical interactions which led to the event.
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"Why did it happen?" This asks for an emotional cause: "What was the motivation?" If it was an unmotivated event, in which something happened without someone deciding to do it, this is answered by the "how" above.
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"When did it happen?" This is a specific place, which is a physical attribute.
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"Where did it happen?" This is a specific time, which is also a physical attribute.
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"Who was involved?" This asks for which person, answered by the physical fact of a specific person
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"Who would do such a thing?" This is a completely different question which asks for an emotional answer, a variant of "Why?"
I could now logically determine what kind of answer is requested by any question.
I applied the "three-thing" to the cultural dichotomy of Man, and found a trichotomy instead:
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Men are from Mars: men instinctively think in terms of concrete actions and choices, and see other people as physical beings. For men, the physical reality is the basic foundation of all.
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Women are from Venus: women think in terms of changing impressions and reactions, and see other people as emotional beings. For women, the emotional reality is foundational, and the physical is an expression of that.
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Aspies are from Vulcan: People on the autism spectrum, like me, instinctively reach for logic when we don't understand something or want to solve a problem. I yearned to meet more people like me, people focused on logic and thought, and I found them on the Internet. (Oh, how the times have changed...) For me, logic and truth are the foundation.
I now had a basic map for dealing with people.
I applied the "three-thing" to ontology, the study of what types of things exist.
I asked myself what the difference was between being "right" in the sense of having the correct answer and being "right" as in choosing morally. I realized I already had a built-in map in my mind of the opposites of things: right/wrong, correct/incorrect, and so on, but I had simply not sought to articulate or formalize it before:
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Moral: right/wrong
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Logical: true/false
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Philosophical: wise/foolish
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Physical: changing/static
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Scientific: accurate/inaccurate
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Emotional: good/bad
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Psychological: thriving/perishing
I have since applied this to other philosophies, to value systems and economics, to psychology and the editing of the subconscious, to physics, to political tribalism and the Libertarian view of taxation, to Trinitarian theology, to music theory, and even (after watching Pixar's Ratatouille) to food theory. In each case, I've found answers readily available through Triessential analysis. I've seen rhetorical triads in anything about which people speak rhetorically, and they're usually Triessential. I have come to believe that this three-way categorization is how the human brain recognizes and categorizes the world, subconsciously or consciously.
I've seen books written with Triessential underpinnings, such as Arnold Kling's "The Three Languages of Politics" focusing on their differences and reconciliation, and Simon Sinek's "Start With Why" focusing on the sequential nature of motivation. I've seen how Triessentialism is the answer to Objectivism's missteps, and accounts for postmodernism's criticisms of modernism in meaningful ways. I've even seen it explain the rise of drag queen story hour at libraries.
Now I want to start producing content based on Triessentialism. I want to write a book, start a podcast, generate a wiki, do something to get this worldview out there and being talked about. I also want to talk about these concepts in a place I can refer back to, and analyze new things I haven't yet applied it to. So I finally made this post, partly to organize my own thoughts and brainstorm, but also to get reactions from smart and interesting people.
Ask me to elaborate on anything, or to analyze anything. Ask me to react to something. I'll do my best to apply Triessentialism so you can see how it functions.
A thinker, a strategist, a flawed man, a great man. Today I am grateful for Michael King Jr., renamed by his father for the Protestant hero Martin Luther after a pre-WWII visit to Germany.
I had my first full decade of life in the 1980's, the era of Star Wars, Back To The Future, E.T., Garfield, and The Cosby Show. I never knew the world before Reagan except in archival footage and textbooks. My toys and clothes came from garage sales and hand-me-downs from other church kids' families. I knew well the 'zip-zip' sound of corduroy pants. I grew up in Albuquerque Public Schools, where half of my classmates were Hispanic, with names like Sanchez and Chavez and Baca, and I didn't have a Black classmate until Albuquerque High School.
My favorite sitcoms were ALF and The Cosby Show. ALF was the story of an adopted outsider, a weirdo who disrupted a middle-class family's home with antics and humor. The Cosby Show was the story of a middle-class family in New York, and how the professional parents raised their many children right. From ALF I learned about the existence of alcoholism; from The Cosby Show I learned about the existence of dining rooms. From ALF I learned about the national security state which was ready at any moment to burst in with guns drawn; from The Cosby Show I learned about the grand legacy of Historically Black Colleges. I identified with the kids, Brian Tanner and Rudy Huxtable, who were both my age. If ALF and The Cosby Show had ever had a crossover, Dr. Cliff Huxtable and ALF would have riffed off each other for a solid half-hour of laughs.
Once I left high school, I discovered to my dismay that people consider ALF the more realistic show.
Back to Dr. King.
Civil rights bills and amendments had been making progress leading up to his "I Have a Dream" speech, given at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. On November 22, 1963, the man who had proposed the legislation, President John F. Kennedy, was murdered most foully while the bill was being filibustered. Nobody knew for certain who did it, but the moment was as shocking to the Negro people of America as the slaying of The Great Emancipator, President Abraham Lincoln.
Tons of history has been written about these events and personalities. I'm here to be grateful to Dr. King for the one truly lasting thing he did: he called on America to remember its founding promise of freedom:
In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
His speech insists that the Negro continue the path of nonviolent awakening of America to her faults, and called upon the conscience of Americans in power, through what we would come to call mistake theory instead of conflict theory. This is what I, as an American of late Generation X, am grateful for.
But D.C. being D.C., the government used the opportunity of freeing one group to restrict all, as Barry Goldwater said was happening:
I am unalterably opposed to discrimination or segregation on the basis of race, color or creed, or on any other basis; not only my words, but more importantly my actions through the years have repeatedly demonstrated the sincerity of my feeling in this regard. This is fundamentally a matter of the heart. The problems of discrimination can never be cured by laws alone; but I would be the first to agree that laws can help—laws carefully considered and weighed in an atmosphere of dispassion, in the absence of political demagoguery, and in the light of fundamental constitutional principles.
...[mentions his support for 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights bills, and the calm deliberation Congress used to be known for]...
It was in this context that I maintained high hopes for this current legislation—high hopes that, notwithstanding the glaring defects of the measure as it reached us from the other body and the sledgehammer political tactics which produced it, this legislation, through the actions of what was once considered to be the greatest deliberative body on earth, would emerge in a form both effective for its lofty purposes and acceptable to all freedom‐loving people.
It is with great sadness that I realize the nonfulfillment of these high hopes. My hopes were shattered when it became apparent that emotion and political pressure, not persuasion, not common sense, not deliberation, had become the rule of the day and of the processes of this great body. One has only to review the defeat of common‐sense amendments to this bill — I amendments that would in no way harm it but would, in fact, improve it—to realize that political pressure, not persuasion or common sense, has come to rule the consideration of this measure.
...[disputing the constitutionality of the bill as written and claiming it is a power grab]...
My basic objection to this measure is, therefore, constitutional. But in addition, I would like to point out to my colleagues in the Senate and to the people of America, regardless of their race, color or creed, the implications involved in the enforcement of regulatory legislation of this sort.
To give genuine effect to the prohibitions of this bill will require the creation of a Federal police force of mammoth proportions. It also bids fair to result in the development of an “informer” psychology in great areas of our national life —neighbors spying on neighbors, worker spying on workers, businessmen spying on businessmen, where those who would harass their fellow citizens for selfish and narrow purposes will have ample inducement to do so. These the Federal police force and an “informer” psychology, are the hallmarks of the police state and landmarks in the destruction of a free society.
I repeat again: I am unalterably opposed to discrimination of any sort and I believe that though the problem is fundamentally one of the heart, some law can help—but not law that embodies features like these, provisions which fly in the face of the Constitution and which require for their effective execution the creation of a police state. And so, because I am unalterably opposed to any threats to our great system of government and the loss of our God‐given liberties, I shall vote “no” on this bill.
And that was the end of Goldwater's future aspirations, the end of mistake theory as strong politics, and the end of Libertarianism in America outside of conservative conclaves.
Four years later, both MLK and RFK, the Black and the white faces of civil rights, were slain three months apart.
I have never known an America without conflict theory as strong politics, except in the time before I knew anything about politics. Upon reviewing how greatness was slaughtered, the inner cities became drug-and-gun ghettos, and reason was slain, I join with my generation in looking on in observance of utter loss... then turning away and uttering a coping "Whatever."
A suggestion: to avoid especially acrimonious discussion and SSC-posting being our only hallmarks as an independent community, let’s discuss things we can generally come together on.
In a Culture Peace thread, I’d expect to see:
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An explanation of part of one’s own culture/group identity/tribally specific hobby one feels is misunderstood, without denigrating those who misunderstand
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Events or news stories which genuinely sow harmony instead of discord
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Suggestions for additional Culture Peace actions we can do on The Motte, elsewhere online, and in real life