Three Telos Model

The Three Telos Model or "Triangle Political Map" or "Political Trichotomy" is a explanatory model of political ideology. It's a way to describe political beliefs based on the core axiom of the philosophy called a telos. The Three Telos Model 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. This is a departure from the standard cartesian spaces such as the two-dimensional political spectrum.

It can be thought of as being dual to Grid-Group Cultural Theory in the sense that each can be transformed in some way so that it ends up looking just like the other theory. There are some similarities in approach to Schwartz's Theory of Basic Human Values.

The core concept is that there are three teloses or axiomatic end goals which are fundamentally incompatible with each other. Favoring any one telos comes at the expense of another. In this way the model is an attempt to show how differing balances of core values result in different ideological positions.

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 expresses as a decomposed aspect of the three teloses. Each telos has a different meaning in different context and the theory holds that each context should be able to be decomposed into three differing stances which align with each telos.

	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 / Network	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, Traditional 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

The use of a Cartesian space has been the standard practice for mapping ideology but there is no clear reason why this topology is preferrable.

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). This would imply a horse shaped political spectrum embedding in a 2D space. This concept has little to no academic traction but it does illustrate the problem which arises from a simple 1D political spectrum. National Socialism has had such an effect on modern politics that any explanatory model which fails accommodate both the Nationalism and the Socialism is clearly lacking. The Three Telos Model does not encounter such an issue as there can be many types of authoritarianism (illiberalism) on the lower edge from Egalitarianism to Traditionalism.

Political philosophers have argued that a good political ideology must also incorporate constraints between different desires. 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". The implication of this being that both Equality and Freedom are desirable but they have fundamental incompatibilities. Constraints such as these can be expressed by changing the topology of the ideological space to make having full Equality and Freedom impossible in the model.

It may still be useful to represent political ideologies that violate the constraints and are practically untenable. Even if the ideology is in some way suboptimal or inherently self-contradictory, people may still hold espouse it. It is unclear if the ultimate goal of such political maps is to chart the space of what people claim to believe or what is political viable.