C01 General Principle

Which do you think is more likely?

Any judgment of good or bad is always subjective and arbitrary.

OR

Good and bad can be linked to the objective facts or our needs.

Anankelogy

While morality has its arbitrary side, anankelogy recognizes it also includes an objective dimension. For example, while you choose how to react to feeling threatened in a conflict, your life objectively requires to remove any actual threat to your ability to fully function. You do not choose to have your defenses painfully provoked, only how you interpret and act upon your triggered defensiveness.

Anankelogy distinguishes between the objective fact of unchosen needs and our subjective chosen responses to such needs. It calls this moral distinction. While we can disagree about how to morally respond to our needs, there is no point in disagreeing with the objective phenomena of the needs themselves. If I tell you that I am thirsty, or must find my own purpose to excel at my job, it remains pointless for you or anyone to disagree. These needs exist amorally.

The morality judging things as good or made serves as code for need, in more ways than one. First, in the obvious sense that morality outlines a code of conduct to guide our need-impacting behaviors. Second, in the less obvious sense that moralitysymbolically represents what you and I require to function, personally and interpersonally. And more specifically to what we choose to act toward each other’s unchosen needs.

Labeling something as good categorizes it as beneficial to our needs, and to our capacity to function. Good friends provide for our objective need for social support, for companionship. A good road provides for our need to get us to our destination. A good private space provides for our need for solitude. Apart from such needs, there is little to categorize as good or bad.

Yes, we often regard something as “good” or “bad” in a purely aesthetic sense. “Good food” may taste great but not necessarily good for you. Our aesthetics serves our need for appreciation, for beauty and potentially for meaningfulness. The more something appeals to us, and we view it as good, the more it satisfies some emotional need. What satisfies one need may be less satisfactory to another. Bad food may be stale, for example, but still sufficiently nutritious.

Anytime we label something as bad, we are categorizing it as objectionable to our needs and to our capacity to function. A bad friend is one who betrays you. A road full of potholes that could damage your car you naturally regard as bad. A private space easily invaded is not so good, or maybe even bad for your need for solitude. After all, you didn’t choose to have these needs.

If every core need exists as an objective fact, then anankelogy suggests there is an objective side to morality. The less you can resolve your objective needs, the more your capacity to function objectively declines. Bad. The less you can resolve your objective needs, the more your capacity to function objectively declines. The more you can resolve your objective needs, the more your capacity to function objectively improves.

Need-response

Need-response clears up a lot of moral relativism. Morality is relative to the absolute of unchosen needs. You can adjust what you do about your needs, and others can change what they do or don’t do in response to your apparent needs. But no one can relativize the natural needs themselves.

When anyone compromises your need for self-efficacy, for example, your wellness suffers independent of your subjective awareness of the experience. The less you can freely do for yourself, the less you can fully function. Your body then warns you of this diminished level of functioning in the form of emotional pain.

Your pain subjectively follows the objective drop in your ability to fully function. Existentialismreminds us that we have far more choices than often assumed. But apply this only to our chosen responses to our unchosen needs. Once the objective fact of a need occurs, it is then too late to circumscribe it with moral options.

Reactive Problem

The more we assume others can change what they need to suit our own expectations, especially if coercing them to suppress their needs to honor ours, the more their capacity to function will objectively decrease. Anankelogy recognizes this conflating of unchosen needs with chosen responses as moral conflation.

The less they can fully function, the less they can capably honor our needs. The more one pressures another to respect one’s own needs, in the name of what one deems as “good”, the less capable the other can respect that need. This easily leads to anger, to a risk of emotional abuse, and sometimes results in violence.

The more you rationalize your need to defend yourself at any cost, for example, the more you easily overlook the other side’s inflexible need to defend themselves. This applies also to wars between nations or between different ethnic peoples. The selfish standard applied gets easily replied in return, easily inciting cycles of violence that blinds each side to the other side’s inflexible needs.

When failing to first affirm another’s unchosen needs when confronting their actions affecting your own needs, you risk provoking their pain. They naturally dig in their heels when you trigger their defenses over something then cannot possibly change. Just as you naturally get defensive when confronted by another.

Anankelogy recognizes this rush to label something goodor bad as a component in need-response conflationor moral conflation. That’s when you assume unchosen needs and chosen responses are the same thing. The more you provoke mutual defensiveness with such self-serving moral stances, the more you easily provoke pain that all would prefer to avoid.

Once you go down that pain-normalizing path, you tend to moralize pain as bad. Your “good” sinks to the level of avoiding pain more than resolving the needs causing your pain. Your “bad” sinks to the level of suffering the pain your own behavior provokes. You sink to the level of discomfort avoidance that traps you in painfully diminished levels of functioning.

Responsive Solution

Need-response carefully distinguishes between your unchosen needs and anyone’s chosen responses to them. This can help you deescalate many conflicts. The more you affirm another’s unchosen needs before you bring up their chosen behaviors, the less you get yourself in trouble.

Need-response offers a simple communication format for this. You may recognize it as the “praise sandwich” that sandwiches the “bad news” of how they negatively affect your needs between two pieces of “good news”. Consider this example:

• Good news: “I affirm your need for self-determination, and prefer to avoid doing anything that could restrict your right to choose your own destiny to reach your life’s full potential.”

• Bad news: “However, I must point out how your recent actions can threaten my security. I don’t see how you can reach your full potential while limiting mine.”

• Good news: “I will assume you mean no harm. I trust you intend to do your best, and together we can find ways to mutually respect each other’s affected needs. Thank you.”

This praise sandwich approach points to the anankelogy principle that wellness is psychosocial. Modern frameworks tend to reduce wellness to its internal biological and cognitive elements. This needlessly stigmatizes those requiring support after suffering damage from socioenvironmental threats to their wellbeing.

Research now exposes the oft-overlooked harm of our norms of hyper-individualism. Watered down philosophies of existentialism allow the powerful to blame the relatively powerless for the threats and suffered harms these powerful folks repeatedly cause.

While you individually experience the bad of such threats and harms, it is not entirely good to expect you to do all the therapeutic changes. Especially if those bad socio-environmental threats keep damaging your wellbeing. Need-response exist to address such external contributors to your wellbeing.

Instead of relying on alienating norms that pits us against each other, or assumes powerholders are inherently bad, need-response addresses the unchosen needs on all sides. Need-response provides you the tools of responsivism, to cut through alienating norms to incentivize others to support your wellness needs.

You can then challenge the “bad” of unresolved needs with the increasing “good” of resolving more needs, reducing and even removing the cause of pain, and restoring more wellness.

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:

• Can a need be “bad” because it only occurred from a bad behavior?

• Good tasting food can be bad for you, so maybe it’s how we used those labels.

• Good and bad remains distinct from right and wrong, so how does that apply to all this?

• My good could be your bad, and that relative side of morality is not covered here.

• Relieving pain feels good, but you’re saying that this is not actually all that good?

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.