A01 Foundational Principle

Which do you think is more likely?

Needs are too subjective for any scientific inquiry.

OR

An aspect of needs exists outside of subjective experience, allowing for scientific inquiry.

Anankelogy

Anankelogy isolates that part of your needs which occurs outside of any subjective experience of them. You feel thirsty when your body requires more water, but that requirement for water occurs as an objective fact. You only subjectively feel thirsty after the objective fact of your body requiring more water.

Likewise, you feel lonely when requiring help from others to do things you objectively cannot do for yourself. If you cannot get anyone to help you climb out of hole, your ability to continue functioning as before objectively diminishes. Needs come first. Emotions follow to convey such needs. Once the need fully resolves, there’s no longer any cause for such emotion.

Every experienced need first emerges as an objective fact about your ability to function. Your body then reports such needs in your subjective experience of emotions. Your emotions suggest what you can quickly do to ease that need, if necessary. Often with little if any regard for the needs of others.

Anankelogy distinguishes between core needs for functioning and what we do about such needs that we conventionally also label as needs. I may say I need a glass of water, but more accurately I need water that I prefer to be provided in a glass. Since I can get that water from a bottle or direct from a water fountain, anankelogy identifies these as preferences and not literally as needs. If there is any flexibility, you can "prefer" one thing over another and still objectively function.

Your need for water is inflexible. How to get that water is flexible. So anankelogy speaks of “inflexible needs” to point to these core needs. Anankelogy appreciates resources to resolve your core needs exist less flexibly that how we access such resources. And who should access, you or somebody else, exists far more flexibly.

This helpful distinction allows the academic discipline of anankelogy to better understand our needs. We can now delay gratification. We can postpone the urge to ease our discomforting needs so we can better understand the full gamut of our experience of needs.

Need-response

We can now describe what is happening with a set of needs without rushing to insist what should be done about such needs. Need-response applies this discipline when challenging the privileged norm of relieving pain of unmet needs by enduring the discomfort it takes to resolve needs. Once resolved, the body no longer has cause to use pain to warn of a threat to functioning that no longer exists.

Reactive Problem

As long as we assume all needs stem from subjective experience, we tend to link each need to our choices. If only we made better rational choices, we wouldn’t be in so much pain. Or do goes our assumptions.

While volition plays a role, you never choose to be thirsty. You never choose to be hungry. Or to be lonely. Each of these starts not with some subjective experience from our choices, but from an objective change in your ability to function regardless of your choices.

Your choices can influence when you feel thirsty. But you will eventually require water to restore your body’s fluid equilibrium. You cannot choose to simply ignore your body’s demand for water and still be able to objectively function.

Responsive Solution

The more we suspend our reliance upon impersonal rules and rational choices, the more we can get back to addressing our many overlooked needs. Instead of stumbling into disappointment after disappointment, we can do much more to dynamically engage each other’s specific needs.

Need-response counters normalized alienation of impersonal rules with mutual respect for one another’s engaged needs. Need-response provides tools lacking in all of the other professions for fully resolving our needs. In the process, need-response holds the powerful accountable to the results of their influence upon our vulnerable needs.

The more you allow need-response to fully resolve our needs, the more we can all function individually and collectively. The more needs we resolve, the more problems clear up. The more we resolve our needs, the more of our potential we can reach. The more we respect each other’s needs, the more we can spread around much needed love.

Responding to your needs

How does this principle speak to your experience of needs? Post in our Engagement forum your thoughtful response to one of these:

• Certainly there are aspects of needs beyond the scope of scientific inquiry.

• Could this apply to philosophy and other areas currently regarded as mostly subjective?

• How could need-response answer the decline in trust in our institutions?

• I can see room for abuse by bad faith actors insisting their subjectivity has some objective core.

Instead of selecting one of these, post your own engagement feedback about your experience with the subject of this principle. Remember the aim is to improve our responsiveness to each other’s needs, toward their full resolution. If you’re new at posting here, first check the guide below.