The Triadic Covenant: Universality, Heritage, and Common-Sense Rationalism
A Layman’s Thesis for the Post-Inversion Era
The year is 2025, and the West is exhausted. Eighty years of defining itself by what it is not—not Nazi, not racist, not patriarchal, not colonial—have produced a politics of perpetual negation. Policies are no longer chosen for what they build, but for how cleanly they invert the ghosts of 1945. The result is a civilization that can recite every atrocity of the Third Reich yet struggles to name a single positive principle that does not begin with “never again.” This reactive loop has delivered open borders without cohesion, equity without excellence, safety without speech, and empathy without evidence. It is time to break the loop.
Enter the Triadic Covenant: three interdependent pillars—Universality, Heritage, and Common-Sense Rationalism—braided into a single, self-reinforcing framework for policy, culture, and daily life. None stands alone; each checks and completes the others. The Covenant is not a return to the past nor a surrender to the present; it is a forward contract that refuses to let yesterday’s monsters dictate tomorrow’s menu.
Pillar I – Universality: The Equal Moral Worth of Every Human Life
Universality is the steel spine inherited from the post-war human-rights revolution, but stripped of its suicidal overextensions. It asserts one non-negotiable truth: every person, regardless of tribe, tongue, or time of arrival, possesses identical moral value and deserves equal protection under law. No quotas, no hierarchies, no “more equal” animals. This is the firewall against eugenics, genocide, and caste.
Yet Universality in the Covenant is bounded. It is not a suicide pact that demands the dissolution of borders, the erasure of merit, or the equalization of outcomes. It is the floor, not the ceiling. Equal worth does not mean identical treatment; a heart surgeon and a janitor share the same right to life, but not the same right to operate. Universality supplies the why of justice; the how is supplied by the other two pillars.
Pillar II – Heritage: Genetics and Cultural Continuity as Public Goods
Heritage is the living bridge between generations—biological, linguistic, artistic, culinary, architectural, and moral. It is the recognition that humans are not blank slates dropped into history at year zero, but bearers of inherited code: DNA that shapes temperament and disease risk, and culture that shapes stories, holidays, and table manners. A society that severs this bridge breeds rootless anxiety; a society that worships it breeds suffocating tribalism. The Covenant keeps the bridge sturdy and open to traffic.
Policy implications are concrete:
- Genetics: Public investment in CRISPR for single-gene disorders, but a total ban on designer babies or racial eugenics. Parental choice within the bounds of Universality.
- Culture: Mandatory core curriculum in national literature, history, and civics for every child—public, private, or home-schooled.
- Language: One official tongue for public life (to ensure Universality in courts, ballots, and classrooms), with robust private support for ancestral languages (to preserve Heritage).
- Architecture & Symbols: Preservation of historic statues and street names unless they explicitly celebrate genocide; new monuments commissioned by open competition, not ideological purge.
Heritage is not nostalgia; it is stewardship. A people that forgets its grandparents’ songs has no melody for its grandchildren’s future.
Pillar III – Common-Sense Rationalism: Deductive, Empathic, Intuitive, Critical
The third pillar is the operating system: a four-stroke engine of thought that runs on evidence, empathy, gut instinct, and relentless questioning. It is the antidote to both ivory-tower abstraction and mob hysteria.
- Deductive: Start with first principles—supply and demand explain housing prices; pathogens, not sin, cause pandemics.
- Empathic: Walk a mile in the other person’s shoes, but do not confiscate the shoes.
- Intuitive: Honor the evolved wisdom of chest-tightening fear or stomach-churning disgust; these are data, not defects.
- Critical: Subject every claim—especially your own—to falsification. The scientific method is not optional.
In practice, Common-Sense Rationalism kills sacred cows with a smile. It asks: Does the policy work? If affirmative action lifts the truly disadvantaged without punishing the truly qualified, keep it. If it does the opposite, scrap it. If wind farms save carbon but sterilize raptors and blight horizons, recalculate. If drag queen story hour delights five-year-olds without sexualizing them, fine; if it does, reschedule for adults. The test is outcome, not ideology.
How the Triad Interlocks
The genius of the Covenant is mutual correction:
- Universality without Heritage becomes rootless globalism—open borders that collapse welfare states, meritocracy that erases identity.
- Heritage without Universality becomes blood-and-soil fascism—citizenship by DNA, culture as cage.
- Rationalism without Universality becomes sterile technocracy—efficient trains running on time to nowhere meaningful.
- Rationalism without Heritage becomes presentism—AI ethics debates that forget Shakespeare, climate models that ignore cathedrals.
Only the full triad produces stable prosperity. Example: immigration policy.
- Universality demands a path to citizenship for those already integrated and contributing.
- Heritage demands numerical caps and cultural assimilation requirements to preserve cohesion.
- Rationalism demands data-driven point systems (skills, language) and sunset clauses for every amnesty.
Another: education.
- Universality: Every child, regardless of zip code, gets a laptop access and a great teacher.
- Heritage: Every child masters the nation’s founding documents and at least one ancestral art form.
- Rationalism: Every child learns phonics, algebra, and the replication crisis before TikTok algorithms.
Implementation: From Covenant to Constitution
The Triadic Covenant is not a party platform; it is a constitutional amendment package:
- Article of Universality – “All persons born or naturalized are equal before the law; no state shall deny life, liberty, or property without due process; no state shall mandate unequal outcomes.”
- Article of Heritage – “Congress shall preserve the genetic health, linguistic continuity, and cultural inheritance of the people; it shall neither establish nor abolish any tradition by force.”
- Article of Rationalism – “Public policy shall be evidence-based, subject to cost-benefit review every decade, and reversible upon demonstration of harm.”
A permanent Triadic Commission—rotating citizens chosen by lot, not election—vet every bill for compliance. Veto requires two-thirds majority from any pillar.
The Post-Inversion Promise
Under the Triadic Covenant, “Never again” is no longer the engine; it is the guardrail. We honor the dead by refusing to let their murderers rent space in our future. We build schools that teach both the Federalist Papers and the Middle Passage. We welcome the weary stranger who learns our songs and adds his own. We cure sickle-cell anemia without editing embryos for eye color. We debate drag queens and border walls with data and decency, not dogma and deplatforming.
This is not utopia; it is equilibrium. The Covenant does not promise perfection—only the only combination that has ever worked: equal souls, rooted stories, and clear heads. In 2025, as the inversion engine sputters, the Triadic Covenant offers the West a new North Star: not the opposite of evil, but the presence of good.
hld, Joseph Henrich The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt
ty Myth, David O. Sacks & Peter Thiel The Parasitic Mind, Gad Saad
t The Once and Future Worker, Oren Cass Human Diversity, Charles Murray
ell The Scout Mindset, Julia Galef Superforecasting, Philip Tetlock & Dan Gardner Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker
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