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Take sides in a conflict without affirming each other’s unchosen needs and you get burned. Opposing what others needs does not extinguish a moral conflict, but enflames it. The more you fuel conflicts, the more you reinforce problems. Take time to understand the affected needs on all sides. Serve the underserved needs fueling a conflict and you help solve problems. Need-response provides this engaging alternative to typical undisciplined approaches to conflicts. You solve more conflicts with mutual regard than indulgent side-taking. You solve more problems with love.
Mutual regard for each other's unchosen needs meets the minimal standard for a responsive reputation among peers, and for earned legitimacy of authority figures. Need-response incentivizes us to be more responsive to the needs of others than they are to our needs. As long as we can function enough to be responsive to our own needs, we can strive for competitive responsiveness or competitive legitimacy. That's the challenge when the need-responder exclaims, with an exclamation point, “Engage!”
Which would you expect to create better results?
Challenging powerholders with their biased adversarial process.
OR
Engaging powerholders with our mutually beneficial process.
Mutually respect each other's needs.
Resolve more needs than them.
Shift from unresponsive habits to creating valuable responsiveness. Move beyond to feel-reactive norms to be as need-responsive as possible. Once invited by any need-responder, this can help to improve your “response reputation” and “earned legitimacy”.
Response reputation: Measurable responsiveness to anyone’s needs to improve wellness. This applies mainly to the relatively powerless Reporting Impactees (RI).
Earned legitimacy: Measurable responsiveness of authority figures to the needs of the relatively powerless. This applies specifically to powerful Ascribed Impactors (AI).
Response reputation is not public. It is only available to others in the wellness campaign and to other need-responders bound by our terms. Anyone leaking a responsive reputation without the RI’s permission face reduction of their own responsive reputation.
By contrast, earned legitimacy can immediately go public since AI impacts the public in ways vulnerable members of the public have a right to know. Anyone publicizing such measurable legitimacy and receives gratitude can have their responsive reputation go up.
You can tie many societal ills to common failures to distinguish between low hanging fruit reactions and higher principled responsiveness. Need-response distinguishes between
commonly accepted behaviors compromising responsiveness and legitimacy
and
less common nobler actions that improve responsiveness and legitimacy.
Need-response provides seven of these key distinctions for improving your responsiveness to needs.
Distinguish between chosen actions and unchosen needs.
Distinguish between avoidant generalizing and engaging specifics.
Distinguish between relieving pain and resolving needs to remove cause for pain.
Distinguish between mutual defensiveness and mutual engagement.
Distinguish between psychosocial vacillation and psychosocial balance.
Distinguish between belief reductionism and dynamic relating.
Distinguish between extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation.
Let's outperform each other. Instead of reaching for the minimal standard to mutually respecting each other's unchosen needs, we dare you to go further and try to address more of those needs. We dare you to improve your responsive reputation or earned legitimacy by helping to resolve more needs on all sides. We dare you to empirically contribute to measurable wellness outcomes of improved lifestyles, reduced addictions, and greater life satisfaction. Engage!
You can demonstrate more responsiveness to needs the less you buy into the norms of avoidant adversarialism. If you one of those who rush to take sides in every issue, to avoid dealing with the messy details, these seven distinctions are for you. Especially for authority figures who negatively impact our lives when failing to make the distinction.
Each of these seven distinctions points the way toward resolving each other’s underserved needs to better solve our problems. The better these distinctions can get you beyond the paralysis of avoidant adversarialism, the better your responsiveness reputation. And the more needs finally can resolve, the greater the earned legitimacy.
After explaining the distinction, testably hypotheses are offered under the subheading Measurably Accountable Impacted Needs. More on these “MAIN” testable hypotheses elsewhere. Let’s proceed.
1. Distinguish between chosen actions and unchosen needs.
Responsiveness and legitimacy depend on recognizing the affected needs on all sides in a conflict. If you didn’t deliberately choose to be in the situation you find yourself in, why assume the others chose to be in it? If a result a poor choices, is that an excuse to ignore the underlying needs?
You can choose to eat in response to feeling hungry. You cannot choose not to be hungry. You can choose to find a friend for meaningful connection. You cannot choose not to be lonely. You can choose to be alone for a while. You cannot choose not to require solitude. Chosen actions follow unchosen needs, and neglecting this distinction needlessly sparks many conflicts.
We routinely overlook the unchosen needs of others when conflating them with chosen actions. You can choose to drink a cup of coffee but you cannot choose not to be thirsty. Anankelogy demonstrates how all natural unchosen needs sit equal before nature.
One of the most frequent errors stems from going too far to avoid an error. Many of us misapply the valid critique of “false equivalency” and “false balance” to equally valid unchosen needs. It is not “bothsidesism” to affirm the unchosen needs on all sides of an issue; it is an alarming sign of avoidant adversarialism to dismiss the unchosen needs of those who poorly express them. Those critiques aptly apply only to our responses to one another’s unchosen needs, never to those immutable needs themselves.
This also applies to the critique of “whataboutism” when it wrongly dismisses any affected unchosen need. Yes, what about the unchosen needs on all sides to a conflict? Not as a counteraccusation to avoid the original point raised, but to ensure disputes stay focused on what either party can actually change. No one can change their naturally existing unchosen needs to suit another.
Reread this text above and replace “unchosen need” with “unchosen priority”. Besides each unchosen need existing as an objective fact, anankelogy recognizes how each naturally prioritized need exists as an objective fact. You can choose to eat now and sleep later. You cannot choose to not require nutrition more than your body requires rest in that moment.
Beneath the veneer of chosen political differences are these unchosen priorities driven by a particular psychosocial orientation we do not choose nor can change at will. Developing responsiveness and legitimacy depend on limiting critiques to chosen response while affirming the unchosen needs and unchosen priorities behind them. This is where a praise sandwich format helps to maintain this essential distinction between chosen actions and unchosen needs.
Positive: | Affirm their unchosen needs behind their actions. |
Negative: | Address how their chosen responses affect your unchosen needs. |
Positive: | Commit to continue supporting each other’s unchosen needs. |
Measurably Accountable Impacted Needs
The more you affirm the unchosen needs of those with whom you’re in conflict, the more you reach the responsiveness level of “standard” responsiveness.
The less you affirm the unchosen needs of those with whom you’re in conflict, the less you reach the responsiveness level of “standard” responsiveness.
The more your affirmations and disciplined critiques results in resolved needs on all sides to a conflict, your responsiveness reputation goes up.
The more your reactions and faux critiques correlates with the affected needs on all sides to a conflict staying unresolved, your responsiveness reputation stagnates. E.g., The more you misapply “bothsidesism” to unchosen needs, the lower your responsive score.
2. Distinguish between avoidant generalizing and engaging specifics.
Responsiveness and legitimacy depend on identifying and addressing all the relevant specifics affecting each other’s needs. The more you avoid relevant specifics when leaning into comforting generalizations, the less responsive to needs. The more you shift from generalizing to dealing with the specifics necessary to more fully resolve needs, the more responsive to needs.
Anankelogy recognizes each of us experience a relatively fixed way to relate to whatever affects our needs. Anankelogy calls this your relational orientation.
Relational orientation: habituated way you relate to life, either relying on generalizations or delving into relevant specifics.
Generalizing-over-specifying: prioritizing relief-generalizing over engaging relevant specifics.
Specifying-over-generalizing: prioritizing engaging relevant specifics over relief-generalizing.
This is not a natural priority but one of developmental maturity.
Measurably Accountable Impacted Needs
The more you address the relevant specifics in life, the greater your wellness.
The more you depend upon comforting generalizations to avoid engaging relevant specifics, the poorer your wellness.
The more you guide those you impact to rely on generalizations that distract them from the specifics affecting their needs, the less responsive you are to their needs.
The more you guide those you impact to move beyond generalizations to sort through the specifics that ultimately enables them to resolve needs and remove pain and restore wellness, the greater your responsiveness to their needs.
3. Distinguish between relieving pain and resolving needs.
Responsiveness and legitimacy depend on facing the natural physical or emotional pain that reports threats. There is no such thing as pain apart from unresolved needs. Once a threat is removed, your body no longer has cause to warn you with pain. You can then restore your ability to more fully function.
The more a threat to your ability to function gets removed, the less cause your body has to keep warning you with pain. But the more you avoid the perceived threat by settling for relieving the pain, the more your body must persist in warning of this ever-present apparent threat. Such discomfort avoidance fuels many of our problems.
Pain is not the problem as much as the threats your pain seeks to warn you about. As conditions allow for fewer needs to fully resolve, we naturally suffer increasing pain. We get sucked into the norm of reacting to this mounting pain, which tends to leave us in more pain.
We grow accustomed to dull yet manageable pain, but that load of pain can grow to less manageable heights. After all, we typically prefer the pain we feel over the pain we fear. We know, for example, how to handle the pain of repeated disappointment better than handling the pain of risking what often seems like inevitable rejection. So we normalize loneliness along with other less responsiveness to our needs.
Anankelogy recognizes each of us experience a relatively fixed way to deal with pain as our easement orientation.
Easement orientation: habituated way we experience the pain or discomforts we face in life.
Relieve-over-resolve: prioritizing relieving pain that leaves the source of pain in place to cause more pain over removing cause for pain by resolving the underlying need or needs.
Resolve-over-relieve: prioritizing removing cause for pain by resolving the underlying need or needs over relieving pain that leaves the source of pain in place to cause more pain.
This is not a natural priority but one of developmental maturity.
Measurably Accountable Impacted Needs
The more you avoid removing any threats by trying to relieve pain (in yourself or in others), the more problems persist.
Short-term easing of painful pressures is okay as long as it doesn’t displace the aim of fully removing the threat, or removing oneself from the threat.
The more you identify and address the threats to be removed (or can remove oneself from the threat) to then remove cause for pain, the less problems persist.
The more you can get through the sharp discomforts of facing and removing threats so you can fully function, the greater your wellness.
The less you can get through the sharp discomforts of facing and removing threats, the less you can fully function and the poorer your wellness. s
Likewise, the more you support others you impact to get through the natural discomforts of facing their threats to functioning, to restore their functioning, the greater your responsiveness to needs.
The less you support others you impact to get through such discomforts so they end up not being able to fully function, the less responsive to needs.
4. Distinguish between mutual defensiveness and mutual engagement.
Responsiveness and legitimacy depend on staying open amidst painful conflict to get to the affected needs on all sides. Mutual respect resolves more needs than mutual defensiveness. It’s all too easy to get defensive and closed off when feeling hurt by opposition. It’s all too common to rationalize getting defensive, when the other threw up their guard first.
It’s not easy to remain open amidst conflict while the other remains closed off. But it can be done. Even as the other side buries you with insults, you can defy expectation by keeping your guard down. You resolve more conflicts with mutual engagement than remaining stuck in mutual defensiveness. Even if such engagement starts unilaterally with you.
It’s best to get through a painful conflict by not reacting to the first volley of words. Each side tends to test the waters with something that seems defensible in the moment. If you can show yourself trustworthy to engage them, you can then get to the core of the dispute: their vulnerably affected needs.
The book of Job captures this moment: “Teach me and I will be silent,” Job replies to his detractors, “and show me how I have erred. How painful are honest words! But what does your argument prove? Do you intend to argue with my words, when the words of one in despair belong to the wind?” Author John Powell put it this way’ “To understand people, I must hear what they are not saying, what perhaps they will never be able to say.”
A bulk of our low responsiveness and illegitimacy points to our accepted norm of instantly opposing anyone with whom we have the slightest disagreement. Surely we all come to our beliefs squarely on reasoning, the assumption goes, so why bother exposing our vulnerably felt needs?
In the rush to oppose what another says or does, we too often oppose the unchosen needs they cannot change. Opposing what others need does not extinguish moral conflict, but enflames it. Once they feel their unchosen needs threatened, they predictably dig in their heels. The produce more of what you oppose. What you reactively resist you then reflexively reinforce. Rational debate has nothing to do with this.
We deceive ourselves when we normalize mutual defensiveness in the name of rational debate. A rush to debate usually skips the details that really matter in life. There is less reason to debate the more you can vulnerably relate. The quicker you can address and affirm their unchosen needs, the sooner you can help resolve the conflict.
We complain how divided we’ve become and blame others for getting so defensive. But we easily ignore our own role in provoking another’s defensiveness. We treat them like the enemy, When the real enemy is our indulgent adversarial stance. To paraphrase Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us!” What I do to you I ultimately do to myself: mutual defensiveness.
Author Gordon Fellman, in his 1998 book Rambo and the Dalai Lama: The Compulsion to Win and Its Threat to Human Survival, identifies this problem as “adversarialism”. That’s where we objectify others as enemies we must overcome, in our hyper-rationalized win-lose games. And he counters this popular “adversary paradigm” with what he calls a “mutuality paradigm”.
Fellman goes on to speak about our need for “mutuality institutions” to replace our “adversary compulsion” built into our adversarial institutions. Need-response aims to be just that. To fulfill Fellman’s vision to “move toward a predominantly mutualistic society.” To help get us there, need-response unpacks what anankelogy identifies as our routine reaction to conflicts.
Anankelogy recognizes each of us experience a relatively fixed way we handle such conflicts. Anankelogy calls this your conflict orientation.
Conflict orientation: habituated way you relate to the others amidst a conflict with them.
Guarded-over-openness: prioritize avoidance of the pain of conflict over enduring the pain of conflict to identify and resolve the underlying needs provoking the conflict.
Openness-over-guarded: prioritize enduring the pain of conflict to identify and resolve the underlying needs provoking the conflict over avoidance of the pain of conflict.
This is not a natural priority but one of developmental maturity.
Measurably Accountable Impacted Needs
The more you remain open amidst conflict to identify the affected needs on each side, leading to resolving each other’s needs, the greater your wellness.
The more you remain closed amidst conflict to guard yourself from perceived hurt, leading to mutual defensiveness and perpetuating the problem, the poorer your wellness.
Likewise, the more you support others you impact to remain open amidst conflict and resist the urge to get defensive, the greater your responsiveness to needs.
The less you support others you impact to remain open amidst conflict or encourage them to get defensive, the less responsive to needs.
The more you can nurture a social environment away from adversarialist norms of mutual defensiveness into a mutualistic environment of mutual support to resolve each other’s needs, the greater your responsiveness than others who merely stop enabling mutual defensiveness.
5. Distinguish between psychosocial vacillation and psychosocial balance.
Responsiveness and legitimacy depend on addressing self-needs and social needs equally. It’s actually painful when your self-needs resolve better than your social-needs, or when your social-needs resolve better than your self-needs. Neither is more important that the other for your capacity to fully function.
Anyone’s self-need for personal freedom is just as important as their social need for cooperation. Anyone’s self-need for times of solitude is just as important as their social need for times of companionship. Anyone’s self-need for self-initiative to do what they’re fully capable is just as important as their social need for social supports to cover areas they require some help.
You do not function as well if your self-needs resolve better than your social needs. Of if your social needs resolve better than your self-needs. Anankelogy recognizes this as psychosocial imbalance.
To ease the tension, we tend to focus on one to the neglect of the other, until later when we focus on those neglected psychosocial needs to the neglect of the first set. Anankelogy recognizes this as psychosocial vacillation.
To resolve the tension, follow nature’s cue to address each psychosocial need in complement to other more resolved psychosocial needs. You embrace your needs to improve your independency, for example, while not neglecting where you must be more dependent. As Ecclesiastes 7:18 puts it, “It’s good to hold onto one and not let go of the other.” You resolve self-needs on par with your social needs. Anankelogy recognizes this as psychosocial balance.
Anankelogy also unpacks political differences to uncover the unchosen priority of psychosocial needs shaping each other’s political view. Anankelogy recognizes how our political differences stem from each of us having a different psychosocial orientation.
Psychosocial orientation: habituated way of resolving one set of psychosocial needs more than the other set.
Wide: Self-needs resolve more than social needs.
Deep: Social-needs resolve more than self needs.
This one is a natural priority and not merely one of developmental maturity. This experience stems more from situations impacting one’s needs than from how responsive to the needs.
Each of these presents a natural priority that exists as objective fact. The problem is not this natural distinction but responding to it in one of two ways:
Reactive psychosocial vacillation: Relieve pain of unresolved needs by swinging between generalizing how to relieve self-needs and later generalizing how to relieve social-needs.
Responsive psychosocial balance: Remove cause for pain by thoroughly resolving self-needs when they come to the fore, then fully resolving social-needs when they come to the fore of your attention.
Yes, this is not a natural priority but one of developmental maturity.
You express your inward psychosocial orientation with your outward political views. You can choose your political responses but no one chooses their psychosocial orientation.
Those with a wide psychosocial orientation tend to lean politically left. They tend to have a strong sense of who they are individually, but feel less included in society. They historically favored more government intervention when that government can be trusted to serve their minority interests.
Those with a deep psychosocial orientation tend to lean politically right. They tend to enjoy strong familial ties and group cohesion, but feel their individuality disrespected. They historically favored more individual rights and less government interference in their self-directed lives.
Need-response is less concerned by these different psychosocial oriented different priorities, and far more with the tendency of political elites to pit the unchosen priority of needs of one side against the unchosen priority of needs of the other side. The more AI hinder RI to resolve their unchosen psychosocial priority of needs, the less responsive and less legitimate such AI.
AI political leaders who share the political outlook of their supporters can earnestly believe they are serving them. But their political outlook is typically formed when their psychosocial needs are resolved far more than their zealous supporters. This can present an ethical problem. They lead supporters to champion policies that benefit themselves more than their supporters. Need-response can guide such AI political leaders to be more responsive to the needs of their own political supporters.
Need-response can guide AI political leaders and RI voters to empathize with all sides to a politicized issue. Need-response provide eight exemplary responses each side of an issue can give to honor the affected needs of the other while remaining true to their own affected needs.
As political leaders heed these other distinctions, they can more easily support all political sides to resolve more of their affected needs. In the process, they can boost their brand as they effectively depolarize politics. They can then attract far more support and votes across the aisle, even as they personally champion their own psychosocially prioritized needs with policy preferences. They can be trusted to be more empathetic to the others with different policy preferences.
Measurably Accountable Impacted Needs
The more you address self-needs on par with social needs, to enable more of your needs to fully resolve, the greater your wellness.
The less you address self-needs on equally with social needs, allowing tension to build as fewer needs resolve, the poorer your wellness.
The more you can affirm the unchosen priority of those of a different psychosocial orientation, presented as a disagreeable political view, the more you can move past chosen responses to address unchosen needs and support resolution of those needs to demonstrate greater responsiveness.
The less you can affirm the unchosen priority of those of a different psychosocial orientation, and react to their disagreeable political view, the less you can move past chosen responses to address unchosen needs and likely hinder resolution of needs to the point of being marked as unresponsive.
6. Distinguish between belief reductionism and dynamic relating.
Responsiveness and legitimacy depend on honestly relating with each other’s actual needs. What we believe about our needs or the needs of others never matters as much as how responsive we are to such needs. The more try to fit our unmanageable needs into our manageable beliefs, the more we tend to neglect or overlook the complicated path to fully resolve them.
The further we get from each other, the more drawn to hyper-rationality. Rational choice theory gets watered down to serve our preference to avoid messy details. We drift from understanding an element in decision-making to overgeneralizing all decisions as economic calculations, ignoring the emotionally driven needs compelling actions beyond mere conscious thought.
The less we can function because of mounting unresolved needs, the more we naturally seek cognitive shortcuts. We downsize what is true to fit into our collapsing categories. We convince ourselves we are rational when actually suffering from what anankelogy recognizes as belief reduction.
As a type of avoidance, belief reduction evades relevant evidence outside of one’s beliefs that could actually resolve their needs. A matter is reduced to what one thinks is true or not to avoid facing those uncomfortable needs. Everything outside of that bubble gets repeatedly ignored. Tunnel vision sets in. Confirmation bias takes over. Needs kept from resolving. Pain left to spread. Wellness deteriorates.
Belief reductionism is where someone diminishes a piece of wisdom with universal application as merely some disputable belief. Or dismisses another’s attempt to introduce a helpful idea we all could mutually explore. Or disagrees with someone out of hand without getting to the indisputable unchosen need the other is struggling to express.
You can see an example of belief reductionism when this wisdom-inspired content gets dismissed as just another set of competing ideas. Or rejecting the notion of a spiritual gift of wisdom that has inspired universal principles enriching us all. Or claiming that “Steph believes natural needs are unchosen” when no evidence exists to support that anyone can choose to be thirsty or to decide to be lonely. You can see this when someone would rather debate something as mere belief to avoid relating honestly to their life.
It generally projects their “beliefism” that assumes every idea results from some rationally chosen belief, overlooking all the other factors that shape perceptions and interpretations. If you can rationally choose all of your beliefs, you could potentially find some rational to believe a hot oven will not burn your hand when touched. Or simply choose not to be poor. Mostly, beliefism prioritizes believing in things over trusting in people. Beliefs risk less than trust. But beliefism risks slipping further into the agonizing abyss of fewer resolved needs.
Such belief reductionism lets its adherents avoid risking any discomfort of vulnerably applying it to their own life. Such reductionists put guarded individualistic reasoning over honestly interacting about how to best resolve the needs each other faces. It serves the norms of alienation and isolation fueling the loneliness epidemic.
By contrast, dynamic relating refers to continual openness to updating what is known, or believed to be known. It recognizes how things do not hold steady at all times. That what was true yesterday may be less true or not true today. It seeks to continually update beliefs prone to be in error.
This requires more cognitive investment than beliefism or belief reduction. It invites illumination of blind spots, those things others observe about you but you cannot spot. It explores new ideas that challenge assumptions. It encourages revising one’s stagnant perspectives. Most importantly, it leads to resolving more need.
It adds a vital tool to the need-responder’s resources to help us all be more responsives to each other’s, and our own, neglected needs. Using rational choice theory to explain decision-making serves as one of many tools in the need-responder’s toolbox, but its watered-down version can be discarded for the shaper tools presented here.
When applied to criminology, rational choice theory often serves as a kind of belief reduction limiting investigators’ ability to actually solve crimes or create just outcomes. The adversarial judicial system suffers from a lack of legitimacy when it reduces violent acts to mere individual choices while it benefits from this narrow scope for its prestige and power. Need-response holds us all to a higher standard: to resolve the needs fueling what gets labeled as crime. It’s empirically disingenuous to assert everyone has the equal opportunity to resolve their needs while ignoring the social environment and other factors limiting actual options.
The concept of crime is largely a social construct that overlooks forms of violence privileged to the powerful. It’s not a U.S. crime for the U.S. to arm the far-right Israeli onslaught of Gazans, yet the loss of innocent life is just as immense. Need-response discipline focuses on any interpersonal or intergroup violence serving one’s own ends, instead of the ideologically manipulated concept of crime focused more on disadvantaged individuals.
Need-response encourages all individuals, authorities and institutions to dynamically relate to the needs of us all. Especially to the exposed needs of vulnerable RI. Leaders make better decisions the more they’re updated with impact data. Need-response incentives RI to “speak truth to power” to provide that essential data, and incentives AI to “listen to those impacted” to improve their earned legitimacy.
Measurably Accountable Impacted Needs
The more you let go of what you believe to be open to disconfirming evidence, and the more this fresh insight enables you to resolve more needs, the greater your wellness.
The more you cling to what you believe and dismiss principles challenging your beliefs and indulgent actions, so that fewer of your needs can resolve, the poorer your wellness.
The better you can relate to whatever impacts the needs of those around you, the greater your responsiveness.
The less you dynamically relate to whatever impacts the needs of those around you, the lower your responsiveness.
The more you enable constituents to shift from their beliefism to dynamically relate to the evolving details affecting their needs, the greater your legitimacy.
The more you hinder constituents from questioning their beliefism to the point they overlook the evolving details affecting their needs, the lower your legitimacy.
The more you let go of any belief reduction that insists law-focused adversarial systems rarely make damaging mistakes, to dynamically engage in reports of such mistakes, the higher your legitimacy.
The more you cling to belief reduction that insists law-focused adversarial systems rarely produce costly mistakes (like wrongly convicting the innocent), the lower your legitimacy.
7. Distinguish between extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation.
Responsiveness and legitimacy depend on optimizing internal incentives and minimizing external incentives for responding to needs. Relying on threats of punishment or fines or loss of property are never as sustainable as rewarding others who willingly respond to needs.
This is not exclusive to anankelogy. Vast literature exists on extrinsic and extrinsic motivation. For convenience, anankelogy looks at this distinction as another possible orientation.
Motive orientation: habituated way of what incentivizes you the most into action.
Extrinsically motivated: Behavior gets reinforced more from external rewards for meeting demands of others than internal rewards from pursuing own potential.
Intrinsically motivated: Behavior gets reinforced more from internal rewards from pursuing own potential than external rewards for meeting demands of others.
This could be a natural priority dependent on context. At a job you hate, you could be motivated more by extrinsic motivators like a paycheck. At a job you love, you could be motivated more by intrinsic motivators like grateful clients. Intrinsic motivations arguably produce better results than extrinsic motivations.
Leaders relying on extrinsic motivators correlate with poorer results than those leaders who find what intrinsically motivates their subordinates. Understanding intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is key to performance management.
Managers often struggle to find which best motivates their staff. Need-response offers a grassroots approach, where line workers provide their supervisor with the impact data that conveys what best motivates the worker. The more productive and contented the worker after utilizing this impact data, the greater that manager’s earned legitimacy.
A similar distinction to make to earn legitimacy is to distinguish between coercive power and asymmetrical blowback. Consider the other extreme, where government authorities rely on such extrinsic motivation as the threat of state violence. Laws are inherently punitive and authorities rarely if ever relate to your affected needs when trying to apply them. Legal authorities risk provoking the very conditions they ostensibly seek to avoid. Legitimacy collapses.
On a smaller social scale, this applies to those targeted for ostensibly breaking the law. A police investigator externally incentivizes a suspect to confess to a crime to avoid facing years in prison. When that coerces the vulnerable innocent to admit to something in which they had no role, the legitimacy of that investigator and anyone going along with it precipitously collapses.
Power really isn’t power unless it results in resolved needs. Otherwise, it’s simple coercive force. The more an authority undermines resolving needs, the less its legitimacy. Making these critical distinctions can be crucial to avoid slipping into the lowest level of violent illegitimacy.
On a much larger scale, this applies to government actor who act with little if any oversight. When no one is watching the watchers, their propensity for violence can erupt unchecked. For example, military officials who believe they are fighting terrorism even as they kill noncombatants in harm’s way.
The coercive power of rogue actors imposing external motivators on behalf of the state, and maybe also a bit for themselves, tend to provoke asymmetrical blowback. Those under the boot of the more powerful state may first exhaust nonviolent option as, until out of desperation they start using violence and even acts of terrorism where they target noncombatants.
The word terrorism is a loaded term used by the powerful state actor, and its propagandist leaning media outlets, to characterize such blowback as illegitimate. Fearmongering helps their cause. Widely available images of blowback violence can be used to disregard these unchosen needs desperately expressed by "terrorism".
Yes, the violence is wrong but so is the violence that provoked it. Indulgent side-taking tends to perpetuate the cycle of violence. Two wrongs don't make a right, but sometimes they make a law favoring the more powerful. Legitimacy of authority can be lost when imposing a hidden cost. Authority proves less necessary where such needs can freely resolve.
Need-response instills the discipline, in these moments of rationalizing violence on all sides, to address the unchosen needs on all sides. Each side’s chosen reactions get distilled through this lens of responsiveness to unchosen needs. Need-response denies legitimacy to state actors that impose extrinsic motivation to coerce compliance to their demands, even if privileged by law or majority vote.
Reality is not a democracy. The reality of your unchosen needs or my unchosen needs or anyone’s unchosen needs is not amendable to any vote. They occur despite anyone’s wishes. Using violence against anyone’s unchosen needs earns certain denunciation or worst.
Democracies function best when debating policies for our needs and never the needs themselves. Political elites undermine democracy when manipulating us to dispute our different needs. That is undemocratic. If you want a better democracy, first affirm each other's different priority of needs. Only then can you legitimately debate different policy options.
Measurably Accountable Impacted Needs
The more you rely on extrinsic motivation, the poorer your wellness.
The more you encourage intrinsic motivation, the better your wellness.
The more you think you must resort to external rewards including threats of violence, the more you have overlooked their actual needs.
The more you find what internally motivates others to the point they can function more optimally, the more responsive to needs.
The less you engage the unchosen needs of others as you rely on extrinsic motivations, the lower your legitimacy.
The more you engage the unchosen needs of others as you encourage their intrinsic motivations, the greater your legitimacy.
Engage!
Identify the affected needs on all sides of a conflict.
Address each other’s relevant specifics, to counter overgeneralizations.
Aim to resolve needs to remove cause for pain, to counter habitual pain relieving.
Cultivate mutual supports, to counter mutual defensiveness.
Encourage resolution of both self-needs and social needs, to counter polarizing ideologies.
Continually relate to the expressed needs of others, to counter unchecked assumptions.
Find what rewards others from within, to counter coercion that robs them of opportunities.
Engage!
Try being more responsive to the unchosen needs than others than observe what happens.
No more disrespecting others with a different view.
No more passive reliance on impersonal rules when you can directly address their needs.
No more indulgent side-taking, which easily opposes another’s inflexible needs.
No more complicity in widespread pathologies like depression, addictions and suicide.
No more excuses.
Engage!
Instead of avoiding each other or opposing each other, get to know what each side actually needs. You don’t have to promise you can do anything about their needs. Simply listen to them express their needs.
Engage their needs. Learn. Empathize. And never, ever, ever oppose their needs. Only challenge what you can do about their needs, or illuminate for them how their actions impact you or the one’s you love.
But never oppose the needs themselves. That can only trigger defensiveness, which pulls each other into the dark and away from the liberating light of love.
Engage!
Shift from taking a stance on issues to relating to the needs behind the issues. Dissolve the tensions by being responsive to each side’s entrenched needs.
Love is the higher moral standard we must now enforce. We now hold you accountable, as well as ourselves, to putting the needs of others ahead of your own. No excuses. Your responsiveness to the needs on all sides of a conflict will now be evaluated.
The more your love helps others resolve their unchosen needs, the greater your responsive reputation. And the greater your earned legitimacy. We will accept no less from those impacting you.
Engage!
Engage!
Your responsiveness to engaging opponents
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