Three Telos Model

The Three Telos Model or "Triangle Political Map" or "Political Trichotomy" is an alternative to the standard two-dimensional political spectrum. It's a way to to describe political beliefs based on the core axiom of the philosophy. It is based on the concept of a ternary plot where the different underlying philosophies can be mixed but must sum up to the totality of the of the persons ideological position.

There are several slight variations of this. A sample of various implementations are in the following videos:

• "ShortFatOtaku"
• "Academic Agent"
• "The Symposium"
• "francis chow"

Decomposition

Many familiar concepts can be decomposed to align with each other within this concept.

	Equity/Equality of outcome	Freedom/Liberty	Tradition
Justification	It is fair and reduces harm	People have a need for self-determination	Traditions have evolved over a long period of time through trial and error to prove practical effectiveness
Philosophical Foundation	Young Hegelians, Critical theory and Marxism	Liberalism and Enlightenment Humanism	Ancient philosophy and Right Hegelians
Prestige Identifier	Victim Culture	Dignity culture	Honour Culture
Economics	Marxism/Socialism	Free Market Capitalism	Mercantilism / Feudalism
Structure	Flat	Meritocratic / competence hierarchy	Inherited Caste / Class Hierarchy
Power holder	Government	Worthy	Caste/ Class
Basic unit	Group / Collective	individual	Family / Tribe
Truth source	Postmodern denial of truth	scientific method	Divine Knowledge
World view	Power Structures	Materialism	Idealism
Moral Foundation	Care	Liberty	Loyalty/Authority/Sanctity
Vision of Nature	Unconstrained Utopian	Constrained Emergent	Constrained Structured

Ideology Placement

As in the two dimensional maps like the political compass, the differing ideologies can be put onto this map.

Nonlinear spaces

Not all ways of classifying a political ideology need map to a cube or use the standard p-norm distances.

What is often called horseshoe theory claims that the extreme authoritarian economic left (Communism) is adjacent or close to extreme authoritarian economic right (neo-reactionism/fascism). A classification that follows this thought must then place these two close by or next to each other: either by using dimensions where they naturally fit next to each other, or by making opinion space curved so that going in the direction of fascism leads to Communism.

Different political philosophers also argue that a good political ideology must also incorporate additional constraints. For instance, from the liberal economic position, Milton Friedman advocated for the necessity of putting one of two desired values ahead of the other by stating "A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both". From the economic collectivist position, anarchist Mikhail Bakunin argued that a good political ideology must have both significant amounts of freedom and equality, stating that "Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality". These positions are not incompatible since both argue for the same result however the difference lies in what is controlled and what is expected to arise naturally.

Such additional constraints would impose further structure on a political classification chart; however, it may still be useful to represent political ideologies that violate the constraints. Even if they are in some way suboptimal or are inherently self-contradictory, people may still hold them.

Calculations

Statistics that can be computed from a political spectrum and a set of candidates include:

• Centrist bias
• Mean minimum political distance