B06 Basic Principle

Which do you think is more likely?

You can change at will any of your beliefs at any time.

OR

You cannot easily change a belief you rely upon to serve your vital needs.

Anankelogy

Your mind holds true or untrue what it finds useful to serve your needs. The more impact, imagined or real, the more you cling to a belief as an unassailable conviction. The less relevant to your needs, the less you hold onto a belief.

If a comet passes by the earth a million miles away, it matters little if you believe it could hit the earth the next time it passes by in the next century. But if headed directly toward us, now your belief of a likely impact matters everything to you.

The less information you find about something likely to impact your needs, the more you tend to generalize to fill the gaps. The less your needs resolve, the more drawn to comforting generalizations to help you get by.

The more your beliefs rely on comforting generalizations that are easily disconfirmed by specifics, the less reliable your beliefs. Generalizations drift from reality, which hinders you from resolving needs. Specifics enable you relate more accurately with reality, to resolve more needs.

The more your beliefs get shaped by what only eases your needs or relieves your pain of unmet needs, the more easily you overlook reality. You become saddled with blind spots or false urgencies to ease the mounting pain. You then rely more on generalizations to avoid specific pain.

The more you rely on comforting generalizations, the less your needs can fully resolve. The less your needs resolve, the more emotional or physical pain you will suffer. The more pain you suffer, the more drawn to comforting generalizations for some kind of relief. Rince and repeat.

Need-response

Need-response shifts attention away from the quality of your thinking to the quality of how well we treat each other. You can be one of the best critical thinkers on the planet, and still clutch for rationalizations when desperately seeking relief from neglected needs.

The more responsive to each other’s needs, the less drawn to false beliefs. You believe what you find enables you to resolve more needs.

The less responsive to each other’s needs, the more drawn to false beliefs. You believe what you find helps you cope with the pain of your unmet needs.

We all cling tightly to beliefs full of errors. The less your needs resolve, the more errant your beliefs. The more your needs resolve, the more your beliefs reflect what is real.

Reactive Problem

Most of our institutions assume you arrive to your beliefs rationally. Our adversarial institutions of law privilege less responsiveness to each other’s needs.

No law requires you to be gracious toward other’s imperfect efforts, or to be empathetic to the poorly understood, or to be patient with those struggling to get it right. These qualities fall outside of the legitimate role for law.

Laws prioritize harm reduction over need resolution. It goes against the grain of law to fully resolve needs. After all, our behaviors are not literally governed by our laws but by our needs. The more we vainly count on our impersonal laws to fix our problems, the more we often believe what we must think is true to cope with the pain of our resulting unaddressed needs.

As modern society loses traditional sources for cohesion, such as a communal faith or a civic community, we easily put more and more faith in our impersonal legal systems. We call the police. We sue others. We overlook the shortcomings of the adversarial judicial system and limitations of divisive politics to somehow fix our problems. We believe these are important to fix matters because we need them to be important to fix matters.

Responsive Solution

Need-response seeks to restore interpersonal respect for each other’s needs. To directly relate to each other’s needs instead of relying blindly on laws to compel each other’s respect. To turn from a culture of outrage to a culture of mutual respect.

The more need-response can inspire you to believe in the importance of personally expressing your need to others, the more you can believe that laws serve more as a backup system than the plan A we vainly expect them to be.

One way we can better identify and address our needs is to agree to apply what anankelogy calls character refunctions. These are ethical standards known throughout history to create better results than mere legalistic norms alone.

For example, these five character refunctions can help renew relationships constrained by some wrongdoing.

• Grace. The more you meet others where they're at, the less you're pulled into conflict.

• Forgiveness. The more you get past your anger, the less others bring up your faults.

• Atonement. The more you can restore some loss you caused, the more you melt their bitterness.

• Mercy. The more you can suffer loss, the more you inspire others to get past their losses.

• Justice. The more responsive to their needs, the more they can be fairly responsive to your needs.

The more you believe what you find actually resolves needs, removes pain and restores wellness, the more you actually resolve needs, remove pain and restore wellness. You need to believe what improves your life, and let go of believing whatever helped you cope with past pain.

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:

• I choose to believe many of my beliefs, even if nothing in my life requires me to think it true.

• There must be more to what shapes our perception of what is so than simply our needs.

• Surely there is some agency, some personal responsibility, in how we shape our beliefs.

• Is this belief that we believe what we need to believe stem from something we need to believe?

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.