Liberal Dialectic: Terms

Terms - Dialectic In Question - Nordic Model 

2020 Revisions - Machiavelli to Smith 

 Marx to Krapotkin - Freud and Marcuse

Libertarian Centrism - Actual Policy

Liberalism is a big subject.  It may seem like an abstract subject especially with all that is going on recently - particularly this week.  But this blog is especially important to me.  It has been on my mind for a while and serves as a part of the intellectual infrastructure of option3.  Not only is Liberalism a big subject, it is a poorly understood one.  I hope to change that a bit.  Ironically today when many people use the term liberal, they are almost always referring the anti-liberal tradition of Rousseau, Marx, and Engels.  They are wrong.  Let's see why.
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Liberal

Open to new behavior or opinions and are willing to discard traditional values.
        google.com
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Liberal, as a political term, arises in the English language between the 15th and 17th century.  I mark the 15th century as the end of the medieval period (or the Dark Ages) and the start of political modernity* which is the political age in which we both live and out of which we have begun to mature.  I also note feudalism as roughly a component of the medieval period.**  As such, I consider liberalism as both (1) the chief political economic force of history today in the modern Western (and Westernized) world and (2) a rejection of the monarchism and elitism of the medieval period - if not going back further.  

For the purposes of this blog series, the dialectic in question covers the history from about the 12th to 15th century to a date yet unknown.  That date may have passed or remains in the future.  We must now introduce the term anti-liberalism.  Anti-liberalism is the response to classical liberal thinking.  Rousseau is the father of anti-liberalism.  Some have crudely interpreted modern anti-liberalism as collectivism and (administrative) communism.  They overlook anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and still other nascent movements.  

Some use the terms 'classical liberalism' against 'social liberalism'.  I think the terms liberalism and anti-liberalism have their place.  But, for me, the single term 'liberal dialectic' best describes the entire process; in that process, I use the terms 'liberal progressives' and 'liberal conservatives'.  As such, liberalism and the liberal dialectic are, in a sense, synonyms that represent a period in history.  They also point to a politic-economic-historical process.***

I digress.

We are all liberals in America.  Many people - especially on the Right - incorrectly conflate classical liberalism and progressivism.  A better approach involves putting liberal conservatives on the Right and liberal progressives on the Left.  The primary issue that distinguishes a liberal conservative from a liberal progressive is their disposition towards state involvement in the economy.  Conservatives desire less intrusion.  Progressives advocate more.**** 

State involvement in the economy is not the only question.  State involvement in the reproductive lives of women or gun ownership, for example, suggests politics is not always strictly economic - even though both those examples definitely have economic interpretations.  Regardless, some questions of history are indeed complex, primal, cultural, and/or more.*****  

However.  To reiterate, the primary issue that distinguishes a liberal conservative from a liberal progressive is their disposition towards state intervention and intrusion in the economy.  (I may one day regret advocating this view so strongly.)  
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Dialectic

A method of examining and discussing opposing ideas in order to find the truth.

Any systematic reasoning, exposition, or argument that juxtaposes opposed or contradictory ideas and usually seeks to resolve their conflict.
        Merriam-Webster.com

Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.
        Hegel

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A great deal has been said about the term dialectic.  In the context of modern philosophical and historiographical ideas, people think of Hegel.  But, from my reading, German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte first helped to develop the notion that a dialectic is a three-part process: thesis-antithesis-synthesis.  An antithesis opposes a given thesis.  Out of that tension and opposition arises a synthesis that resolves the conflicts that sit between thesis and antithesis.  At face value, it's not that complicated but dialetics may permeate all of human life everything.******

(Among conspiratorial thinkers and researchers, another notion of a dialectic exists: problem-reaction-solution.  This notion has a more nefarious interpretation.  Conspirators create a problem.  The public reacts.  The conspirators provide a solution, which they consciously fashioned in advance in order to augment or to control events.*******  IMO this conspiratorial understanding of the dialectic is not the whole story.  Conspiratorial thinkers have, in some cases, failed to see the more simple view of the dialectic, as described above.) 

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Update (March, 2020): In 2020, I made some additions to this blog series - including general revisions in part 4 and more details on theory in part 5. 

* Political modernity is post-Machiavellian thought that led into classical liberal thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke.

** I freely admit I am not a trained historian.

*** These terms create further problems because, in a sense, I am saying that anti-liberalism is a part of liberalism.  For the time being we simply have to move forward.  Puns intended.  Also, yes, I am saying that history, at least, (political) modern history is economic in nature.  But that could change with time.  And it may not have always been true.

**** I once learned the following model of intrusion ranging from 1) laissez-faire to 2) contract / property legal system to 3) a system that manages allocative efficiency to 4) a system that allows redistributive justice to 5) a full control system (ie socialism).  Liberalism ranges from about stage 2 to 4.

***** In the short run and within the period of time needed to resolve the liberal dialectic, elections can be about personalities, parties, communication strategies, slogans, or a changing cultural and moral landscape.   In the long run and within the period of time needed to resolve the liberal dialectic, policy and politics revolve around money - economic transactions.  The core question for both liberal conservatives and liberal progressives is always: how to build a free and equal society.  And that question always ends up involving money.  (The reason I emphasize this point so much is that people spend a lot of time talking about liberalism and really don't know what the fuck they are talking about.)

****** We can find others who discuss ideas similar to thesis-antithesis-synthesis structure.  George Gurdjieff, for instance, spoke of the arising-negating-reconciling structure.

******* For the purposes of providing an example, some argue 911 was just such an example of a problem-reaction-solution conspiracy.  The attack was not from terrorists (or it was a hybrid-let-it-happen scenario), which enabled The War on Terror.  I'm not arguing this idea at this time.

The Future is Now: Spiritual Awakening

Political Activation - Spiritual Awakening

option3 began as a policy blog in 2012 with the first entry in this blog series: The Future is Now.  A lot has changed since then - not only in the world but in me.  All my misgivings about rationality, politics, and public policy remain in effect.  I began articulating these misgivings in two blogs - one called Governance Failure and another called Arrationality.*  I'm here to push the envelope further.  Spirituality is not a core subject for option3 but it deserves some attention.
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Political Activation to Spiritual Awakening

For the first time in history almost all of humanity is politically activated...global activism is generating a surge in the quest for cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world scarred by memories of colonial or imperial domination.
        Zbigniew Brzezinski, former US National Security Advisor, 2008

There is a revolution occurring in the world today, but it is not fought with armies and it does not aim to kill.  It is a revolution of consciousness...

...The mind does not want to hear this, but the heart rejoices in it.  The dictates of science aren’t so sure about it, but the dictates of consciousness are clear.  Humanity doesn’t need to make another machine; it needs to make another choice.  We need to consider the possibility of another way, another option, another path for the human race to follow.
        Marianne Williamson, 2014 (emphasis added) 
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In 2012, I shared the above quote from Brzezinski.  Despite being an unlikely source, he spoke to a profound truth: humanity is waking up.  His focus was the political realm.  However, the rise in global awareness likely exceeds the political into the spiritual.  As much as I attempt to present the work of empiricists and evidence itself, this blog entry also finds its inspiration in creative and arrational thought.  Finding empirical evidence that global consciousness is rising is difficult.  So I'd like at least to share the work of some thinkers that impacted my view of the subject.

David Icke, Dolores Cannon, and David Wilcock are three unconventional people who believe that global consciousness is rising or at least that a unique opportunity to elevate one's consciousness is here.  These three thinkers are not traditional policy people at all.  Some might call Icke and Wilcock conspiracy theorists - or experts depending on your perspective.  Cannon is perhaps best described as a New Age hypnotherapist.  

Icke speaks of 'truth vibrations' as a set of forces that have begun to permeate our world and to enable us to see beyond the madness of contemporary life.  Cannon speaks of a 'new earth' splitting off from our existing earth.  Human life on this 'new earth' will vibrate at a higher frequency; the people who can vibrate at that higher frequency will find a home there.  Wilcock has quite a similar set of ideas to Cannon's.  More could be said about all three.  Perhaps they do not prove that consciousness is rising but they, in conjunction with others, have me believing that spiritual life on Earth is rising.**  (IMO they all merit some Youtube time.)  

To the extent that spiritual life is changing, all levels of our lives will change - including how we think, how we set policy, and how we live.  So what does a more conscious society look like?
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A New Operating System and Concrete Policy

Rapid transition to a regenerative society requires a reboot of our political and economic system to support ecological restoration and the health of the collective.  We can think of this process similar to the design and installation of a new operating system for human society.  Technically, we have the ability to experiment, iterate, and reinvent our political and economic system.  Currently, the inertia of our present social, political, and financial order blocks our ability to envision and enact this metamorphosis.
        Daniel Pinchbeck, Towards Regenerative Society***

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.  To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
        Buckminster Fuller
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Indeed, the subtitle of this section ought to read: Clean Energy, Clean Food, Clean Governance, and the End of Garbage.  Fortunately, the changes themselves are not that complex.  Clean, renewable energy is closing in on fossil fuel.  According to Bloomberg, the average global cost of solar may become cheaper than coal by 2025.  According to The Independent, solar and wind have become competitive with fossil fuel capacity in 30 countries.  Clean food is all but inevitable.  People in the First World want clean food.  People elsewhere will follow and in some cases may actually be leading in this regard.  I am willing to call that without reference.  

Clean governance is not so simple.  Do we have the sufficient consciousness and (political) will for clean governance?  I do not know.  For now, I have hope that we are on the right path and reference Icke, Cannon, and Wilcock.  People will need to learn to make sacrifices.  One of the first things I learned about policy change from Professor Mike O'Hare at UC Berkeley was that policy change, no matter how advantageous, creates losers.  We may need to learn to have less, to wait longer, to experience less convenience, and, most important, to invent completely new ways of governing ourselves.  None of these requirements are so bad. ncertainty and personal sacrifice are very unpleasant but they make us stronger.  (I'm quite aware that I do not define clean governance.  I am only beginning to address this subject.  More to come.)

Last but not least: garbage.  The Great Pacific garbage patch and the overall presence of garbage and plastic in global flora and fauna is a serious risk to human livelihood in several forms such as ground water pollution, respiratory problems from garbage burning, increases in diarrhea, and exposure to lead, mercury, and infectious disease.****  Perhaps most important is the relationship between biological diversity and the physical presence of garbage and their overall relationship to human livelihood.

The solution to this question seems obvious: the end of garbage.  Achieving this aim is not so simple and will likely involve landfill (and garbage) mining, garbage taxes, increases in recycling, re-using, and repairing, and material science innovations that make all garbage 100% biodegradable or recyclable.  The hardest and most valuable step is simply establishing the idea in the Zeitgeist that we have no business creating garbage any longer.  Garbage is a notion that has found its end.  To borrow the words of Marc Gunther and to use more nuance and descriptive words, we "want industry to mimic biology, where one species' excrement is another's food."  (Gunther wrote a piece called The End of Garbage for Fortune.)  He is describing a full system, zero waste policy.  

In order to achieve these goals, we are almost certainly going to have to take a step back and evolve at our highest level - that of our spirituality and consciousness.  How else can we sharpen our minds and harden our will?  To quote Einstein, "We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them."
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* Policy is succeeding in a few senses.  For instance, we have not had a World War in decades.  The Clean Air Act of 1970 and Clean Water Act also demonstrate relatively recent and quite substantive achievements in policy.  But acidification of the ocean or the loss of global biological diversity again illustrates we are on a very problematic path as a race.

** A highly reasonable counterargument is the following: if global consciousness is rising, why do we see so much stupidity and destructiveness.  My theory is that, while a larger portion of society is becoming more unconscious, a smaller portion is becoming more conscious.

*** Here is another great and slightly relevant Pinchbeck quote from How Soon is Now: "To realize the latent potential of our digital communications networks, we would build decentralized, peer-to-peer systems designed to be perpetually evolving, supporting social coordination, making easy and hyper-efficient to share skills and resources.  Politically, we would establish something like a functional anarchy, based on nonviolent Satyagraha principles, to supersede the current system of military and corporate control.  New social technologies would train people to make effective decisions together, based on consensus methods as well as ongoing referendums."

**** The LA Times article The World's Trash Crisis, and Why Many Americans Are Oblivious was helpful in writing this blog entry.

Arrationality

Post-Normal Science - Expertise - Arationality

Arationality is an evolving term.  It evolves specifically in reaction to rationality.  Arationality is as much a part of the 500-year process of welcoming science into our consciousness as anything else.  In this sense, arationality was how people thought before the early modern era began around 1500 - admittedly not always to the greatest effect.  
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Arationality

Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphoric mind a sacred gift.  He added that the rational mind was a faithful servant.  It is paradoxical that in the context of modern life we have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine.

          Bob Samples, Metaphorical Mind

The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do; they use their intuition instead; and the intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world… Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.  That’s had a big impact on my work.

Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic, it is learned and it is the great achievement of Western civilization.  In the villages of India, they never learned it.  They learned something else, which is in some ways just as valuable but in other ways is not.  That’s the power of intuition and experiential wisdom.
          Steve Jobs

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The term rational means 'agreeable to reason', which means, among other things, 'the mental powers concerned with forming conclusions, judgements, and inference." (Emphasis added.)  As the antithesis of rationality, arationality is precisely not concerned with forming conclusions - such as on the basis of a premise and the application of syllogistic logic or the observation of a physical object and the application of positivism.  

IMO arationality is the process of generating insights from the sub-conscious, intuition, instincts, or a community at large.  When applied with the proper intention, arationality is (accurate, reliable and valuable) visioning, intuition, instinctual decision-making, and creative thinking.*  

Here is an illustrative story demonstrating how experts try to rationalize processes that fundamentally resist rationalization.  I originally attribute 'arationality' to Professor Gene Rochlin at the Energy and Resource Group at the UC Berkeley.  He used the term in a seminar - ERG 251: Political Economy and Social Theories of Risk (aka PESTR).  According to a story he told, he once was consulting experts at a well-known, high level governmental agency.  (I do not perfectly recall which one.)  These experts wanted to develop accident prediction methods.  This idea is subtle.  

Although you can certainly create statistical models that estimate accident distributions, deterministic models that define unsafe conditions, or management models that reduce overall systemic risk, you can not predict an accident.  Accidents are in their nature and definition unexpected.

These experts wanted to rationalize the arational.  They almost wanted to control fate and to perfectly determine outcomes.  Some people in the social theory of science field call this process model reification - that is to turn an intellectual model into a king of sorts or to give the abstract more concreteness than appropriate.  The story illustrates the vast over-investment in scientific thinking in a situation where the practitioner probably needs to 'step back' and 'look at the big picture'.  With more time, I would apply this idea to question of foreign policy blowback.
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Arationality and Decision-Making

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.
          Einstein
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The points of this three-parter is, ultimately, to help widen the definition of valid and legitimate knowledge.  To re-iterate what I have said elsewhere, our "decision methodologies have somehow not developed in step with our scientific and political innovations".  Clearly the existing notions of valid and legitimate knowledge have left us exposed to world historic risks such as climate change, nuclear power meltdowns, nuclear war, critical ecosystem damage, and biological diversity losses - not to mention geo-political questions not addressed here (i.e. foreign policy blowback).

The front page of the option3 website speaks to various tensions in public policy such as between progressive neo-Keynesian economics and conservative neo-classical economics.  The same tension sits between science / linear thought and arationality.  I begin to address that in why a third option?.  Rationality and science in themselves are neither destructive or constructive.  They are simply tools.  But people have abused science and rationality.  Our prejudices have impacted our readings.  We need to bring these frameworks - progressive and conservative economics, rational and arational decision-making, and others - into better balance.**
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* I would also add that arationality includes empath-ing.  But very few people in the policy realm will know or want to know what that means.

** I decided to footnote the following  informal math metaphor.  If we project rationality onto a Cartesian coordinate system, arationality is orthogonal to the axis of rationality.  In other words, say you put rationality (and irrationality) on the x-axis, you would naturally put arationality on the y-axis.  But we face an immediate question: if the negative 'values' of rationality are irrationality, then what are the negative 'values' of arationality?  Here is my current answer: dis-creativity.  If arationality has a dark side, I currently see it as dis-creativity.  In this simple coordinate system metaphor, you have fours quadrants: 

• rational-arational, 
• rational-dis-creative, 
• irrational-arational, and
• irrational-dis-creative.

Many policy-makers today make choices in the rational-dis-creative quadrant.  They make choices that exhibit some short-term rationality but also exhibit dis-creativity.  I may develop this metaphor further.  An image will convey the idea better.

Arrationality: Expertise

Post-Normal Science - Expertise - Arationality

Informally speaking, an expert is someone with significant training or certification from the academy, a law school, the military, or other societal organization of long standing intellectual significance.  I am going to complicate that definition below.
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'Extended Peer Communities'

Because applied science and professional consultancy are inadequate, something extra must be added onto their practice which bridges the gap between scientific experts and a concerned public...  For the quality assessment of the scientific materials in such circumstances [of post-normal science] cannot be left to the experts themselves; in the face of such uncertainties, they too are amateurs.  Hence there must be an extended peer community.
        Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1992 (emphasis added)
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Funtowicz and Ravetz discussed the rationale of extended peer communities in 1991.  "[T]he need for enriched input is not merely the result of the external political pressures...  When problems do not have neat solutions, when the phenomena themselves are ambiguous, when all mathematical techniques are open to methodological criticism, then the debates on quality are not enhanced by the exclusion of all but the academic or official experts.  

"Knowledge of local conditions may not merely shape the policy problems, it can also determine which data is strong and relevant.  Such knowledge cannot be the exclusive property of experts whose training and employment inclines them to abstract, generalized conceptions.  Those whose live and livelihood depend on the solution of the problems will have a keen awareness of how general principles are realized in their 'backyards'.  It may be argued that they lack theoretical knowledge and are biased by self-interest; but it can equally well be argued that the experts lack practical knowledge and have their own forms of bias".  (Paragraph break added.)

Enter the non-expert...
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The Non-Expert

The nature of policy debates involving science have been transformed by the success of non-expert stakeholders in contributing to the assessment of quality.  Previously, only subject specialty peers could assess quality in connection with refereeing or peer-review.  But when science became used in policy, it was discovered that laypersons (e.g. judges, journalists, scientists from another field, or just citizens) could master enough of the methodology to become effective participants in the dialogue.
        Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1994 (emphasis added)
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Non-expert testimony, as understood in a post-normal science, has many potential sources including but not limited to consensus building, public vetting of ideas, consulting with elders or indigenous knowledge keepers, and community testimony gathering from common people with a vested interest and relevant experience and proximity to a policy issue.

I push envelope a bit further.  
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Alternative Experts and Layperson Testimony

It is time to speak your truth...
Do not look outside yourself for a leader.
        T. Benyacya, Hopi leader (in part) re Hiroshima and Nagasaki
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First, indigenous and traditional knowledge keepers are experts - plain and simple.  To their credit, they are not intellectuals.  But they are experts.  To think otherwise is to remain slavishly committed the scientific sense of the world.  I like science.*  I love economics.  But I know other forms of knowledge exhibit valuable truths that the Western world desperately needs.  We could call them alternative experts, arational experts, or what have you.  People can and will abuse the mantle of knowledge keeper.  But decision-makers, with a proper intention, in the field of public policy who seek true and applicable non-scientific wisdom will find it.  It exists.

Second, layperson or common people are not just non-experts in a pejorative sense.  They are essential and critical to good decision-making in the local setting.  That idea is near the heart of democracy.  Personally I like the terms non-expert and non-expert testimony, as they cut through a lot of unnecessary orthodox discourse.  But the terms have a pejorative feeling.  Hopefully, the innate nature of modern republican democracy will further mature and people will have a stronger voice in public policy; and thus we would not need to resort to such peculiar terms.  The term non-expert itself reflects a kind over-scientization of things.

Now we make the big speculative and intellectual leap...

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* I want to re-iterate that I am not here to bash orthodox experts.  I very much value the expertise of my dentist, my friends who are attorneys and scientists, my acupuncturist, the people at the Genius Bar at the Apple store, etc.  Society would come to a halt without technical experts and all types of experts.

Arationality: Post-Normal Science

Post-Normal Science - Expertise - Arationality

This three-part blog constitutes a foundational essay for o3.  Other foundational essays link from the about page of the website.

option3 strongly advocates the use of mainstream research, linear thought, science, statistics, and rationality.  But option3 also understands rationality has its limitations.  Arationality and non-expert testimony, discussed herein, originate from the philosophy of science and social theories of risk.  

Arationality does not register in the domain of rationality and irrationality.  It is a separate matter altogether.  In a math metaphor, arationality and rational are orthogonal.  The precautionary principle is partially where this idea began.  If you want to jump directly to arationality, see part 3.
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Precautionary Principle...

[is] the precept that an action should not be taken if the consequences are uncertain and potentially dangerous[.]
        dictionary.reference.com

Science has failed our world,
Science has failed our Mother Earth.
        System of a Down, Science #10

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During high school and college I read about nonproliferation and climate change.  I saw them as world historic questions - distinguishing this era and our increasingly global culture.  Since them, it has become more clear that our decision-methods - on a fundamental level - have begun to fail us.

The precautionary principle is in its nature imprecise.  But it reflects an acknowledgement among educated people that science itself possessed a degree of dangerous and perhaps even unmanageable risk, which is a significant question for researchers, policy-makers, and scientific decision-makers.  Some practitioners have yet to see this dilemma.

Science has given many of us the impression that we are in control when we are not.  Indeed, science - linear thought, rationality, or whatever you want to call it - has failed us in a few well-delineated situations.  Enter post-normal science...
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Post-Normal Science*

We knew the world would not be the same.  Few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent.  I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita.  Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

        Oppenheimer, re the Trinity Test

[T]he myth of unlimited accuracy in quantitative sciences has many uses...  With the proliferation of 'models' of all sorts in natural and social science, we must recognize a new sort of pseudo-science...where the uncertainties in the inputs must be suppressed, lest the outputs become indeterminate.  Hence the crisis in statistics is only one manifestation of a general problem of quantitative information, where incompetence and malevolence interact to produce meaningless numbers, deceiving the experts themselves along with the public.
        Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1990
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In 1991, Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz published a paper titled A New Scientific Methodology for Global Environmental Issues.  They argued that in scientific decision-making and risk evaluation, scientists and policy-makers had failed to understand the impact of indeterminacy and extreme uncertainty; decision-making and modeling was particularly problematic when "facts are uncertain, value in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent".  Elsewhere, they referred to neglected aspects of scientific problem-solving that involve "uncertainty, value loading, and a plurality of legitimate perspectives".**  

Funtowicz and Ravetz proposed the term and concept 'post-normal' science this realm of problematic decision-making and modeling. 

Many policy dilemmas - especially involving the environment - demonstrate how powerful is the post-normal science paradigm.  Climate change is a high-consequence risk we face today.  (Truthfully, climate change is transitioning from risk to realization.  I digress.)  Nuclear power is a high-consequence, low-certainty risk we face today.  In other words, climate change has the potential to impact all our lives enormously.  Nuclear power is more subtle; a meltdown has a huge impact on its surrounding land and people but the event itself exhibits high uncertainty and possibly even indeterminacy.***  High-consequence, low-certainty risk is a classic post-normal science scenario.

Funtowicz and Ravetz proposed at least one response to post-normal science situations: the 'extended peer community'...
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* If you want to know more about 'normal' science you can read the Funtowicz and Ravetz's work or see the wiki about post-normal science.

** One component the post-normal science thinking that I do not address here is the manipulation of quantitative findings.  This subject is big and deserves notation.

*** Additionally, consider gun rights.  In the US, gun violence has an enormous impact on people but the values and social science related to this issue exhibit much variability and uncertainty.  Also, consider financial policy is a grand sense.  We have largely acquiesced to massive risk in our financial system.  The savings and loan crisis, the dot-com bubble, and Great Recession all constitute problems of high-consequence, medium-to-high-certainty risk.

why a third option? [1.0] / motivations

These pieces originally sat on option3project.org.  Both written in 2012; quotes and revisions added today.
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This first piece provides background on the policy motivations of option3.  These citations are dated - some replaced.  The second piece addresses the original motivation behind option3.  Please visit the mission on option3project.org. 
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why a third option?

There's an alternative.  There's always a third way, and it's not a combination of the other two ways.  It's a different way.
          David Carradine

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It’s not so much that we need a third option as we need to entertain many new options.  Today Westerners, and to a lesser extent all people, are distinguished by world historic characteristics - foremost including our possession of the atomic bomb, our capacity for global warfare, unprecedented biological diversity losses, and a level of social complexity / instability never before seen.  Despite innovations in philosophy, chemistry, physics, engineering, and medicine, we still face the timeless systemic challenges of depression, scarcity, and violence.

The industrial, philosophical, and medical revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries gave us an opportunity to alter our relationship to these scourges.  And yet, despite profound improvement for some, the prospect of economic and environmental failure for all has perhaps never been greater.  Our decision methodologies have somehow not developed in step with our scientific and political innovations.

Today, 1/6 of humanity has no access to safe freshwater; “imminent extinction” threatens 12% of all birds, 23% of mammals, 1/3 of amphibians, 1/4 of conifer trees, and more than 1/2 of all palm trees; according to ecologist Dr. Anne Larigauderie, “the rate of extinction is now between 100 and 1,000 times higher than the background rate”; 4/5 people on Earth live in a country where income inequality is rising; and every four seconds a child dies of “poverty, hunger, easily preventable diseases and illnesses, and other related causes”; and last, 1.2 million children are exploited in the global commercial sex trade each year.

These figures coincide with shifts in life on Earth since the industrial era began – not likely with randomness or non-anthropomorphic fluctuations.  This situation suggests we are in a world historic time and calls into question our purpose and livelihood.  (I present these figures knowing full well that many measures of productivity, justice, and human well being have improved over the last 200 years, which creates a contradiction that deserves attention.)
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motivations

The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.

          Einstein
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option3 has a primary and a secondary motivation.   One, despite authentic and well-intentioned leaders and advocates, the modern American political system and policy environment exhibits profound deceitfulness, close-mindedness, and corruption. 

Many on each side of the Left-Right paradigm exhibit an unwillingness or incapacity to acknowledge the legitimacy and intelligence of the other side.  The default objectives among many political actors is not policy but power, stature, and money.  option3 looks beyond the divisions in hopes to elevate awareness and stimulate dialogue regarding meaningful American policy questions.

Two, mistreatment and neglect of fellow humans and other sentient beings have perhaps always been a part of life.  But today, despite rising levels of wealth and technical knowhow, we have an unnecessary amount of this mistreatment and neglect.  option3 acknowledges this mistreatment and neglect as a significant question and aim to rise above it.