What we’re about
Are our politics trapped in false binaries? Does our culture feel “stuck”? Do you feel “politically homeless”?
Triangle Common Good is a civic club dedicated to exploring ways to secure the material and social conditions for living flourishing lives in ways that address the failures of our current political order.
We have a set of values that guide us, which you can find below. You do not need to agree with all of them! All you need to join is curiosity and a belief in the ideals of frank discussion, empathy, honesty, and nuance.
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## Vision
We envision a society where our public political philosophy believes common goods, development of community, virtue, and human flourishing are things a liberal politics should pursue, and which takes both positive policy actions towards providing the material conditions needed for these goods, as well as restrictive actions that maintain the psychological and social context needed for these goods to exist, for an active democracy to thrive, and for technology to serve a human experience.
## Mission
We encourage associations that are ordered not just around shared personal identities, but shared material needs and goals, universal aspects of humanity, and building healthy local dependencies, including civic clubs, unions, and mutual aid organizations.
We do this through three avenues:
- Discussions and lectures that promote a “public philosophy” and cultural and policy alternatives to our current political order.
- Discussing policy reforms that address the conditions for human flourishing, income inequality, democratic decision-making, labor rights, and universal programs.
- Designing and implementing pilots of mutual aid, including intentionally designing local, prosocial, not-for-profit digital platforms and decentralized systems.
Put Simply: Society should have goals beyond efficient markets and just the protection of individual negative rights.
## Values
- The functioning of democracy requires some minimal realist theory of truth for productive conversation to occur.
- Technological progress is not an independent, natural force of history we have no control over.
- Measures of efficiency, output, and scale are means and not ends.
- “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” – David Graeber
A Quick Notes on Rules:
Polite, respectful, and empathetic discussion will be required at all times. Vigorous and passionate debate is desired! Challenge each other! However, the fact that we will be reading controversial works will not be an excuse to engage in insulting or offensive interactions.
Upcoming events
3
How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray - Nat Dyer
Weaver Street Market, 404 W Hargett St, Raleigh, NC, USCome join Triangle Common Good in reading Ricardo's Dream: How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray by Nat Dyer.
In this book, the author critiques the tendency of classical economists to create "simple, abstract, numerical models to explain the social world", arguing that in the process, they have developed models that ignore aspects of material reality.
Looking specifically at the legacy of David Ricardo, the influential classical economist who developed the concept of "comparative advantage", the book argues this tendency towards abstractions in economics misses out on the material realities of the world.
Nat Dyer is a Fellow at Schumacher Institute who began his career as an anti-corruption investigator before working for Promoting Economic Pluralism and the International Institute for Environment and Development. This reading will be a chance to talk about pluralism in economics, a concept that will be relevant to some of our discussions so far.
Interview with Author
https://www.salon.com/2025/02/01/how-economics-wrecked-the-world-and-how-we-can-escape-from-ricardos-dream/
Need for Economic Pluralism and Mass Economic Literacy - Cambridge Society for Economic Pluralism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5YO_4Y0x8I
Economics Pluralism and Empirical Turn in Economics - Oxford Economics Society
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3RlHf9SqsU15 attendees
One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This - Omar El Akkad
Weaver Street Market, 404 W Hargett St, Raleigh, NC, USCome join Triangle Common Good in reading Omar El Akkad's One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against.
Winner of the 2025 National Book Award prize for non-fiction.
“One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”
One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This is a "breakup letter with the West", serving as a personal reflection on how the genocide in Gaza changed El Akkad's views on the West, going from someone that immigrated believing in the project of the Western, liberal "rules-based order", only to slowly find that he no longer believed the West could be trusted to embody the values it claimed to have.
El Akkad is an Egyptian born journalist who moved to Canada in his teens, later becoming a journalist covering the war in Afghanistan and Middle Eastern politics. His two novels, American War and What Strange Paradise, would later garner a variety of awards.
A Note: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a topic with a politicized and contested history, which has now merged with fault lines in American politics. However, in line with the book's goal of encouraging a moment of reflection that speaks truthfully about the reality of the present, we will limit how much the discussion gets bogged down in conflicting narratives of the centuries of historical background involved in the region.
The War on Empathy - Lindsay Ellis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwpanShgOp4
Al Jazeera Interview with El Akkad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgcoRA9UkN06 attendees
Past events
86
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