I may have opened up a can of worms in an earlier post, Artificial Intelligence. I linked adulthood with mastery of the fundamentals of philosophy. I doubt that many of us could even give a reasonable definition of metaphysics or epistemology, let alone elaborate on their personal practices in those disciplines. Something I adopted a long time ago to address being able to manage complex subjects was reducing the topic to three things, what I call a triad. Maybe I was inspired to take this approach from childhood when seeing the warning sign on 76^th avenue at the railroad tracks: Stop  Look Listen.

That one’s pretty close to the one I grew up with..

When coming up with A World of Honour, I could see a need for using such an approach to a complicated topic. I put forth A Code of Honour: do no harm, everything by agreement, and be your word as something simple and easy to understand. Now I can see another simple triad to allow access to a deep study of the branches of philosophy that I mentioned. Try this on:

1. Be self-governing – Politics
2. Be your own boss – Economics
3. Be knowledgeable – Epistemology

But before continuing with this theme, I want to refresh our memories as to the why behind all this. I’m proposing this new triad to combat a problem we face, a problem that I previously called The Biggest Problem Facing Mankind: the biggest problem facing mankind is resolving conflicts between one’s feelings and one’s thinking.

I submit that this biggest problem exists for each of us. I’ve been facing this biggest problem since I wrote that post over a year ago. And still I struggle. As I’m writing these words, 2023 is coming to an end. Looking back on this year, I notice that I wrote six posts, one every two months. I could put forth a few scathing adjectives about my progress, but I’ll use a simple one: inadequate. In 2024 I intend to do better. I’ll begin by committing to two posts per month, one by the 15^th and one by the end of the month.

So back to this post. Philosophy and the three branches of it that I’m addressing are not part of any rite of passage that I went through. While I think that I have a reasonable grasp of those branches, the grasp lives for me as a abstraction, impractical for me in day-to-day living. I created this new triad to assist me in being my word, in walking my talk. I’ll be using my life and my challenges to demonstrate how I’ll intend to use this triad to resolve the conflict between my feelings and my thinking.

Be self-governing – Politics

This is the domain in which my feelings seem to rule my thinking. Like writing my blog posts. You would think this should be easy. I mean all there is to do is to sit at a computer or a pad of paper and write. Anyone can do it. What’s the problem? Well for me the problem is this little niggle in the background, leaving me with a feeling if put into words that might be, “I’m not up to this! It’s too hard. I can’t do it”, and then I’d go and play a game of Sudoku. Feelings 1 – thinking 0. Wherever in my life I have something to do that I said I should do but I’m not doing it, I can always find a feeling that gets in my way. I keep forgetting that I’m the Pope and that I govern my life.

Be your own boss – Economics

This is similar to Who’s the Pope but I’ll keep this domain to earning money. I always thought that being my own boss meant going into business for myself, but what if it’s more than that? What if it’s more of an attitude you take into going out into the world, something like how do I earn my way in the world? Be your own boss would then include any method you take on to pay your way in the world. It would certainly include working for someone and being an employee. You and your employer set up an agreement. You work together. You do something to fulfill your agreement. Your employer pays you to fulfill on the other side of the agreement. Both sides simply keep their word. Do we ever think of it that way? I never did until thinking of this post. I always saw this as an either/or situation. I either work for myself or I work for someone else. I doubt if that thinking was unique to me.

Be knowledgeable – Epistemology

I deliberately left this topic for last. I think it’s the most important subject for a human being to master, that this topic, whether we call it epistemology, knowledge or anything else, is what defines us. We are what we know. And it’s much more than just what we know. It includes how we gathered together our knowledge. It includes how we connect our logic to what we know, how we think about what we think. It includes much more than I can ever put into one thousand posts let alone one short paragraph. I know for example that you, dear reader, have adequate knowledge to understand everything that I’ve said. I know that you might agree with me, might disagree with me or might be uncertain about whether you agree or not. I also know that those three options cover all three options not only for this topic but also for any topic that we choose to address. Agreeing with you or not is not really the point. When I think something, I can check: how do I know that? Can I prove that? Am I sure of that? Again, way too much for this short paragraph. Knowledge is critical. We live or die by that.

Which leads me into connecting those grandiose assertions to my earlier triad: do no harm, everything by agreement, and be your word. What do we do when we disagree on something? There’s a spectrum of actions that we can undertake when disagreeing, with go to war on one end and peacefully agree to disagree on the other. What will keep us peacefully agreeing to disagree is taking on do no harm. No matter what the topic [issue], we do our best to do no harm to self or others. Then be our word about that. It’s the glue that holds everything together.

So simple to say, yet so hard to achieve.