B08 Basic Principle

Which do you think is more likely?

Most of your beliefs are accurate and serve you well.

OR

Most of your beliefs are faulty and often serve you poorly.

Anankelogy

Anankelogy recognizes the limits of our ability to know what is exactly true or untrue, or what is partially true. Three broad principles cover the accuracy of what we assume to know as true.

1. All beliefs include some level of error.

It is always impossible to know everything about any topic, so there are bound to be some inaccuracies in what you hold true or untrue about something. You cannot possibly be aware of new facts being created as you rely on previous facts to hold true. For example, you trust you will be prepared for an upcoming phone screening job interview but cannot know that the interviewer is about to reschedule the call.

2. Most of these errors are insignificant and harmless.

While it’s impossible to know everything about something, you generally prioritize knowing the mostimportant stuff to relative accuracy. You’re free to be wrong about matters that don’t impact you or cause you to negatively impact others. For example, you believe your neighbor took a summer trip by jet plane for a vacation in Canada, but it matters little to your life that they actually drove there by car.

3. Some errors are very significant and lead us into trouble.

It’s possible that some of your beliefs, when acted upon, can cause serious harm. Not only to yourself, but also to others. For example, if you incorrectly believe your spouse is cheating on you and you confront them with an angry tirade of accusations, you risk destroying your marriage over nothing. Misinterpreting their denials as a coverup drags you down further into destructive falsehoods. Too many of us are already there.

Need-response

Whatever you hold as true or not true works best when kept flexible with fresh inputs. You don’t know what you don’t know. And once you get defensive, vainly trying to avoid feeling hurt, you risk shutting out the very information your life requires to lift you out of all the pain.

Powerholders tend to be limited by the fact that they don’t know what they don’t know. If they don’t know what they don’t know and overconfident they know enough, they are less inclined to seek this unknown. They risk remaining ignorant of vital information.

What we believe about each other tends to be full of errors. Many of our assumptions can be distorted by exaggerations. Modern society tends to keep us alienated from each other. Rural folks hold may errant beliefs about urban folks as urban folks poorly understand rural folks.

The less accurate the beliefs we act upon, the less we can resolve our needs, And then we find ourselves in more pain. To avoid further pain, we avoid each other further. The many public problems facing us tend to point to this shift from harmless errors to harmful errors in our beliefs about each other. Alienation appears to be slowly killing us.

Reactive Problem

More and more of our beliefs slip into harming others and ourselves because of the widely overlooked problem of avoidant adversarialism. That’s where we indulgently take sides to evade possible pain instead of taking a stand to resolve the unchosen needs on all sides that could remove cause for pain.

We magnify our problems and pain the more we oppose each other. We get mutually defensive and rationalize this as debating. A rush to debate usually skips the details in life that really matter. We squabble over less relevant matters. To vainly avoid pain, we lock ourselves in more pain.

The more we get mutually defensive, the more we tightly cling to faulty assumptions about each other. Here are two examples of such harmful beliefs damaging many lives: 1) the overlooked prevalence of wrongly convicting the innocent and 2) the overlooked differences in organic priority of needs behind our political differences.

1. Wrongly convicted innocent.

The adversarial judicial system incentivizes confirmation bias and tunnel vision among law enforcement. Which leads to misidentifying the innocent as the culprit, and to relying on junk science that rationalizes the belief that the innocent person did the crime, among other harmful errors. These are often dismissed by appellate panels as “harmless errors” that get caught by innocence projects exposing the innocent on death row. The adversarialism baked into the system increases the risk of slipping into many overlooked harmful beliefs.

2. Provoked political polarization.

The adversarial political system pits one group’s unchosen priority of needs against another group’s unchosen priority of needs. Conventional thinking assumes each side must debate each other to get respect for their needs. You are expected to agree or disagree with each other, without first affirming the unchosen needs. That needlessly keeps us apart. Instead of getting to know the specific needs of others, we generalize that they could somehow change their needs to fit our own preferences. But that never works.

There are many more public problems magnified by our errant beliefs. There are many things we get wrong the more we are avoidant and adversarial to the point of rejecting reality. The more you reject reality, the more reality rejects you. The less you integrate reality into your life, the less you can resolve needs. And the more trapped in pain you become.

Responsive Solution

Need-response cautions against relying too much on conventional modes for correcting beliefs. Expecting impersonal education or coercive laws to produce more accurate understandings easily sets us up for disappointment.

Instead, need-response gets to the core of most faulty beliefs, and this is unresolved needs that distort our thinking. The more we continually engage reality to resolve each other’s needs, the more our beliefs naturally sharpen.

Responsivism methodically replaces a defunction that provokes faulty beliefs with a refunction that improves the accuracy of our beliefs.

For example, arrogance is recognized for how it can easily trap you into clinging to false assumptions. Humility opens you to discovering new information and engaging relevant yet overlooked facts.

The defunction of discomfort avoidance gets you to defend your beliefs from criticism, locking you into painful fictions. Discomfort embrace lets you remain open to correction to sharpen your beliefs.

Need-response identifies these defunctions and corrective refunctions in the such problems as the wrongly convicted innocent and political polarization. Responsive exoneration and responsive depolarization can improve the accuracy of our beliefs simply by instilling more love in our lives for each other.

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:

• Reasoning should improve our beliefs if it doesn’t slip into rationalizations.

• How can we know when a harmless belief slips into the danger zone of becoming harmful?

• Can a belief be harmful to one person or group and harmless to another?

• Whose to say which beliefs are full of inaccuracies when we all have our biases?

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.