C03 General Principle

Which do you think is more likely?

Your feelings must continually be checked by rational thinking and democratic laws.

OR

You can understand more when your mind is not compelled to focus on pressing needs.

Anankelogy

Everything you understand fits in some way with your ability to function. If anything gets in the way of your capacity to fully function, your mind can hardly focus on anything else but its priority to keep your life going.

If you did not understand how falling off a tall cliff could kill you, your mind could entertain fancy ideas of gliding over the edge with a pair of untested homemade wings. But once aware of the dangers, your understanding bends to prioritize your survival.

Your biases prioritize your need, your self-continuance. You believe what your life requires you think as true or not. If they didn’t, you risk not being around to contemplate less important things than your own survival. As soon as you perceive any threat to your wellbeing, this priority for your self-continuance commandeers your understanding. Everything else must wait.

This innate priority to persist unscathed fuels your motivated reasoning. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it’s difficult to get someone to understand something when their paycheck requires them to not understand it. Your interpretation of the situation will tend to amplify what seems beneficial, potentially exaggerate what could hold you back, and filter out what seems irrelevant. Your reasoning serves your motivation to continue without painful risks to your wellbeing.

This dynamic often kicks in to avoid the pain itself. Your ability to think clearly can easily fall off the cliff when compelled to avoid the very warning that serves your self-continuance interests. Pain is not the problem as much as the threats they exist to warn you about. The more your needs resolve, the less pain to distract your thinking or to twist your understanding.

Need-response

The more your needs resolve, the more reliable your intuition. Your instincts serve you well when grounded on the reality of what previously led to your full wellbeing without infringing on others. Your more accurate conclusions provide a more reliable lens for framing your perceptions.

Of course, the opposite is true. The less your needs resolve, then the less reliable your intuition. Your unresolved needs prioritize your attention toward their increasingly urgent relief. Your innate priority to ensure your continued functioning willingly takes cognitive shortcuts.

As your needs resolve, your attention can soak in more of what you observe as actually there. Your mind integrates this input. When seeing what attracts other’s interest in you, for example, you don’t have to stumble around trying to get on their good side. Your understanding improves to appreciate what is real.

Each time a familiar need recurs, you instantly can rely on your perceptions. You can rely on your understanding of what’s happening. You can respond quickly, without much reflection. You can enjoy your need resolving again. That’s the wonder of your reality-cultivated intuition.

Reactive Problem

Bombardments of stimuli in modern society tend to overtax our mental capacities. The less we filter out the less relevant, the more sensations we feel pulled to process. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

To manage this cognitive load, we often draw on our generalizations and categorizations. Instead of processing the inputs ourselves, we accept other’s processing as sufficient. Sometimes, that is not enough. Worse, the generalizations and categorizations of others may throw you completely off.

Consequently, we’ve become a hyperrational society. We process less emotionally rich content. And try to force our needs to fit neatly into rational constructs that avoid messy details. When this results in poor outcomes, we typically revert the same failed routines trapping us in pain.

When someone complains of a need they cannot resolve, we’re slow to listen and quick to argue. We’re slow to empathize and quick to take an opposing side. We’re slow to fully understand and quick to categorize and overgeneralize—for our own relief ultimately at their expense.

If honest with ourselves, we’d admit we endure the slow burning pain of many unresolved needs. You likely don’t feel fully understood by anyone. You likely don’t feel fully accepted for who you uniquely are. You likely don’t enjoy the peace of living up to your full potential. We’ve all become accustomed to living lives of quiet desperation. And if honest, we don’t really understand why.

Responsive Solution

Responsivism—the belief and practice to respond better to the needs of others—counters the limits of “adversarialism”. The more personally responsive to the needs of others, the less we feel we must oppose others we don’t actually understand.

The more you can replace habits of avoiding others with routines of engaging each other, the better you can understand others and understand yourself. The more you can replace habits of alienation with norms of mutual encounters, the more you can face the reality that our hyperrationality easily ignores.

This speaks to an advantage of anankelogy over other social sciences. Anankelogy recognizes how the biases of the anankelogist can be reduced or cleared up when the anankelogist is held accountable to promptly and fully resolve each need. The more responsive the need-respondersto their own needs, the more they can be trusted to be professionally responsive to the needs of others. With responsivism, you can develop the skills to become a professional need-responder.

Responsivismequips you to rebuild your interpersonal routines. You’re incentivized to resolveneeds, and not settle for self-defeating relief from your unmet needs’ recurring pain. You sharpen the habit of engaging others despite the momentary discomforts while being vulnerable. You shift from develop the skills of cultivating mutual understanding, shutting down reason for mutual defensiveness that keeps us in the dark.

You open our world to fresh understanding. You take in new insights that can liberate your life. As more of your needs fully resolve, and you support others to resolve their needs, you find a depth of understanding you may not have realized even existed. You can then richly understand the underappreciated scope of the full power of 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:

• Surely I will not fully understand reality simply because my needs are better satisfied.

• I suspect there is more to cognitive distortions than unaddressed needs.

• What about false beliefs that form from trusting bad sources?

• Doesn’t motivated reasoning have a lot to do with conflicts of interest?

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.