The Third Way Fever
This modern world’s got a fever, and it ain’t for more cowbell.
It’s for third alternatives.
Everybody’s itching for that elusive other option, like it’s the last ticket out of a burning city. Ray Oldenburg lit a fuse back in ’89 with The Great Good Place, preaching the gospel of “third spaces”: not the soul-crushing office, not the stifling classroom, but some blessed nowhere, a tavern or coffee shop where folks can loiter without a purpose.
Now the digital scroll’s got us jonesing for a third kind of prose. Not the eye-searing slog of academic journals nor the brain-dead drivel of tabloid rags like The Sun, where the distinction between sentences and paragraphs dissolve. No, we want something in between: literate but not lethal, engaging but not vapid.
And of course, the third way has long been a subject in economics. The eternal cage match of Capitalism versus Socialism has spawned a circus of third-way dreamers: Distributism, Georgism, Mutualism, Economic Humanism, Swedish Democratic Socialism: each a shiny new blueprint for dodging the tired old duel.
So what’s driving this relentless hunt for the third path? Why this obsession with triangulating our way out of every dilemma? I’ve got a hunch, and it’s not just the gin talking: it’s a rebellion against the hegemony of the left hemisphere of our brains.
That left hemisphere’s a factory for binaries, churning them out faster than a Shenzhen sweatshop spits out knockoff sneakers. It’s got a simple playbook: pick an abstraction, call it “X,” and make it your North Star. X becomes the ideal, the guiding light, the pocket deity of your daily hustle. Everything not-X gets cast into the outer darkness: bad, wrong, the enemy. You’re either with X or you suck. That’s the binary trap.
We live in a left-hemispheric world, a mental landscape littered with these either-or ultimatums and they’re all bogus (, man).
Those abstract ideals? They’re just tools, shortcuts to get through the day, not divine commandments carved in stone. They’re supposed to be as serious as a goalpost in a pickup football game—useful for keeping score, but not worth building a church around. True enough for the moment, but not the eternal Truth.
This third-way craze is our gut screaming back at the binary machine, demanding a way out of the black-and-white prison. It’s a plea for nuance, for a world that doesn’t force us to choose between two bad bets.
Keep your guideposts, sure, but don’t mistake them for the map or the territory. They’re just markers, not gods. And the sooner we get that through our thick skulls, the better chance we’ve got of dodging the next great catastrophe built from our binary brains, those events that Nassim Taleb calls “Black Swans.” But more on that another time.
Link to Substack
Eric Scheske
