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Anankelogy offers the public three levels: academic anankelogy, applied anankelogy, and accessible anankelogy. Each with its specific focus. This post focuses on academic anankelogy. The Anankelogy Foundation seeks to make all three an everyday reality.
Academic anankelogy is the scientific study of need. More specifically, it is the social science for the disciplined understanding of our human needs, but can include any need beyond the human experience.
Even planets “need” a central star to orbit in order to maintain its level of energy. Our discussion of anankelogy zeroes in and thinks most critically about our human phenomena of needs. As a basic science, it focuses on research using tools and methods already employed in the other social sciences.
Check out nine ways anankelogy can create something of value for you.
1. Anankelogy serves as a distinctive social science.
Anankelogy aims to complement the other available social sciences. All of these sciences exist to provide us answers to our many human needs.
Psychology offers answers to understand our mind and behavior. By understanding our mind and behavior, we can better serve our needs. Apart from our needs, there would be little motivation to understand our mind or behavior.
Sociology seeks to understand groups and our interactions with each other. By understanding our interactions with others, we can better serve our needs. Apart from our needs, there would not be much incentive to understand our social interactions.
Anthropology helps us understand cultures throughout history. By understanding the dynamics of culture, we can better serve our needs. Apart from our needs, there scarcely be any reason to understand human cultures.
Economics provides clues to understand the trading of goods and services. By understanding our exchange of the things we need or want, we can better serve our needs. Apart from our needs and wants, there wouldn’t be enough cause to understand our economic transactions.
If these all exist to provide for our needs, why not study the needs themselves? From their largely Western worldview, these social sciences often skirt the issue of our underlying needs, as if too subjective of a topic to include. As a result, academic discussions reduce individuals and groups as having motivations, interests, goals and beliefs.
Anankelogy cuts to the chase by delving behind all these motivations, interests, goals and beliefs. Anankelogy clarifies such motivations, interests, goals and beliefs as directed by our experience of needs. Far from subjective, anankelogy shows how each core need begins as an objective fact.
2. Anankelogy shows how a natural need is an objective fact.
Anankelogy begins on the defensible presumption that any natural need exists independent of human subjectivity. Your need for water, for example, exists apart from what you believe or feel. You either maintain fluid and temperature balance with this abundant fluid or you will cease to function—even if you don’t believe it or feel it.
Whatever your life demonstrates as necessary to function exists independent of human subjective experiences. Any essential thing your life requires to function—water to drink, oxygen to breathe, interpersonal connection for support to do what you cannot do for yourself, personal space to do what you can provide for yourself—all exist as an objective fact.
Mind you, this is distinct from the broader concept of need that talks about how we satisfy these core needs. “I need you to buy me a drink” or “I need to find a better job” are not natural needs, but socially constructed arbitrary ways to address a natural need.
Anankelogy emphasizes the objective reality of core natural needs driving our human reactions we may also label as need. We routinely lump together this objective aspect with our less objective rhetoric around “need”. Anankelogy instills the discipline to keep these separate in our illuminated understanding.
3. Anankelogy starts with a nature-based paradigm.
Academic anankelogy, like any social science, begins with a "paradigm" to suggest a framework, or lens, through which to frame concepts to be scientifically tested. Its first paradigm is indigenous, or nature-based. It starts with the challengeable assumption that observable phenomena of needs exist as a feature of nature. This suggests any naturally occurring need exists as an objective fact, independent of human subjectivity. If so, the phenomena of need can now be subjected to rigorous scientific inquiry.
In its most basic sense, a need is movement essential for living things to stay alive. Or movement of any kind by nonliving entities, essential for its function. Subatomic particles move around each other. Even at this most elemental material existence, subatomic particles basically “need” in relation to each other. Much as planets “need” its central star. They move to function in relation to each other.
Just as these particles dance with gravity in relation to each other, much of life dances in relation to others in its environment. Move closer. Move apart. Move closer again and apart again. Cycling again and again and again.
4. Anankelogy defines need for serious study
Anankelogy defines need as anything essential for functioning. You lack something essential for your life to function, so you draw it in. You experience awareness of such depletion as desire, but the essential item to restore yourself to full functioning exists independent of mere desire.
Or you must remove something to fully function in life. You experience awareness of such an apparent threat as pain, but the essential item to remove to return to adequate functioning exists independent of mere pain. There is no such thing as pain nor desire apart from unresolved needs.
At its core, anankelogy defines “need” as movement for functioning. And such movement occurs in observable cycles of nature. This helps makes the experience of our needs scientifically predictable.
5. Anankelogy starts with familiar scientific methodology tools.
The scientific method includes tools to counter the risk of confirmation bias. Anankelogy also utilizes the tool of the null hypothesis for statistical hypothesis testing, which tries to find correlation for the opposite of what the researcher expects to find.
The idea is to not try to prove what you believe during the testing process, but to find enough evidence that—at a statically significant level—can discount what you believe about a correlation. If you cannot find enough evidence to discount what you believe, this suggests you are onto something. You accept ambiguity along your journey of discovery around our more complex experience of needs, to remain open to newer discoveries.
In contrast to the hard sciences like physics and chemistry, the social sciences accept a high degree of uncertainty in observed correlations. Where a chemical experiment expects to find a one-to-one correlation, a social science experiment producing only 70% degree of statistical certainty is good.
The social sciences recognize human behavior tends to be far more complex. Anankelogy also appreciates there are many intersecting factors, than the simple relations between inanimate objects. But anankelogy offers something the other social sciences do not.
6. Anankelogy appreciates your range of biases.
Anankelogy takes this discipline a step further. Anankelogy adds to this discipline something lacking in all other sciences: supportive bias. Instead of treating all bias as only a bad thing, anankelogy appreciates a range from unhelpful to unhelpful biases.
The more resolved the needs of the observer of phenomena, the less of a pull to cherry-pick what their unresolved needs would urge them to prioritize. The more your bias prioritizes the full resolution of needs, which we can label as “supportive bias”, the more you will prioritize seeking the full breadth and depth of reality.
Anankelogy defines bias as prioritizing to ease need. If you’re in pain right now, you will naturally feel biased to whatever can ease that pain. And that can distort your perspective. If all of your needs enjoy full satisfaction, you will experience less urgency to see what your pressing needs compels you to see. You will be freer to see what is actually there, and accept the uncertainty of not seeing all there is to know.
Responsibly keeping your needs resolved makes it much easier to distinguish between normative and descriptive (or empirical) claims. The more your needs remain resolved while observing phenomena, the less tempted you will be to insist something about that observed phenomena. You will generally be more open to disconfirming whatever the the available evidence does not support. Without attention-grabbing needs prioritizing your attention, you can find it much easier to simply note what is there and not what you might expect to see.
Granted, a history of unresolved needs can imprint unhelpful biases. We can keep the traditional scientific tools in place to catch our unwanted biases and illuminate any cognitive distortions. But a fully disciplined utilization of the anankelogical scientific process includes accountability to resolve needs as fully as possible, to liberate one’s potential to relate honestly with intellectual integrity.
7. Anankelogy sheds light on our cyclic experiences.
With its need-based paradigm, anankelogy identifies reflexive correlations. This is where one thing that seems to contribute to change in another item also appears to be changed by that item. This suggests a cycle is in play. A prompts something to change in B, which in turn affects a change in A.
Typically, there are other items in between these initially observed items. The nature-based paradigm informed by indigenous wisdom suggests our needs are affected by a four-quadrant cycle. Move in, be together, move out, be apart…repeat. Anankelogy relies heavily on this four-part cycle to illuminate many aspects about our needs.
For example, anankelogy recognizes you experience pain in response to an excess. Bad. Then you experience relief when that excess gets removed. Good. You then experience desire in response to something depleted. Bad. Then you experience pleasure when replenished. Good. Rinse and repeat these reflexive correlations.
Look for more cyclic diagrams like this, illuminating our experience of needs. This nature-based feature of cycles can illuminate your experience of needs like no other social science can.
8. Anankelogy democratizes science.
This nature-based approach invites anyone to relate closer to their needs than ever before. It provides a basic tool for formulating your own testable hypotheses. It’s called relational knowing.
The more you identify for yourself these need-affecting relations, the less vulnerable you will be to the apparent priesthood of academic experts. That statement serves as an example of relational knowing. The more of this, then the more (or less) of that.
Any layperson can frame what they observe with such a statement. The more hostile my boss, for example, the more defensive I tend to get. The less appreciated for my contributions to the team project, the less incentivized I am to give my full input. The more openly vulnerable I am with her, the more she trusts me with her own secrets. The less I focus on what could go wrong, the more prepared I am to improve my chances for success.
Each of these “relational knowing” statements could be tested. But the most meaningful result has less to do with scientific accuracy and more to do with how fully you resolve such needs. The more resolved your needs, the more other matters can take care of themselves. See, more relational knowing statements.
Such statements are best framed as tenuous associations. You remain open to further possible inputs. You tolerate ambiguity, and let go of having to be certain. The more you remain uncertain about the little things, the more you can be certain about the big things. The more you can benefit from anankelogy, the more your needs can resolve more fully, and the better your life—and all of our lives—will be.
9. Anankelogy replaces "disorder" with "defunction" and "refunction".
Traditional psychiatry with its foundation in the medical model characterizes various maladies as a disorder. In 2008, I recall reading in the introduction to the DSM-IV an admission that the construct of "disorder" lacked precise boundaries. Updated versions drop and add "mental disorders" in what can seem like an arbitrary process. Indeed, some argue to dump the DSM with its outdated diagnostic approach.
Anankelogy with its nature-based paradigm focuses not on what we societally expect from an individual but on the objective fact of how nature designs us to individually and collectively function. Instead of speaking of some mental disease or disorder located squarely in the individual, anankelogy addresses whatever reduces our individual and shared capacity to fully function.
Such "defunctions" are countered by "refunctions" for restoring us personally and socially to more of our full functional potential. With this functional approach, anankelogy does not fall trap to the notion that the individual must do all or most of the adjustments to be well. Rather, it helps us look in all directions to realize the many impacts on our wellness or lack of it. Reaching wellness may require us to sometimes challenge authorities and to transform some calcified social structures to be more responsive to some overlooked needs.
Your response to its need-responsiveness
What do you think about this new social science of anankelogy? What about this nature-based indigenous approach? Can you see yourself benefiting from crafting your own relational knowing statements? Do you have any questions or suggestions? Or simply want to learn more?
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