F02 Authority Principle

Which do you think is more likely?

Questioning authority in the way of resolving needs can only make things worse.

OR

The more authority impedes me from resolving needs, the more I must speak up.

Anankelogy

Legitimacy can be defined as the right and acceptance of an authority, or the justification of coercive power as a right to rule, or the belief that a rule, institution, or leader has the right to govern, or widespread public confidence in the government to ensure political stability.

What all these definitions lack, and many like it, is any reference to needs. Anankelogy adds the dimension of our objectively existing needs. Authority can flexibly adjust to be more legitimate by being more trustworthy to recognize and allow resolution of our inflexible needs.

This effectively challenges the conventional yet arbitrary aspect of legitimacy. Since your needs exist as objective facts that you subjectively experience, legitimacy can be graded by how it measurably impacts your capacity to fully function. We shift the focus of legitimacy away from your subjective dependence upon it, which can be coerced.

The less we can all objectively function because of some relatively arbitrary authority, the less objectively legitimate that authority. Anankelogy distinguishes between subjectively accepted authority and objectively qualified authority—referred to respectively as ascribed legitimacy and earned legitimacy.

Legitimacy naturally declines the less responsive an authority to the needs in its care. And current systems remain poorly equipped to accountably respond to the immovable reality of our objective needs. It easily trips over its own efforts to improve its ascribed legitimacy, typically compromising its potential for earned legitimacy.

Consequently, our trust in elite-led institutions continues to break down. Consider your own level of confidence in legacy media, representative democracy, polarizing politics, and the adversarial judicial system. Anankelogy addresses the widely overlooked problems these all have in common: avoidant adversarialism. Each one incentivizes you to avoid life’s natural discomforts of resolving needs by pitting us against each other for some fleeting sense of relief from the pain it mindlessly perpetuates.

Need-response

Need-response anchors legitimacy in responsiveness to all of our needs. There is no such thing as pain apart from unresolved needs. These divisive institutions lack vision for how to enable you and I to optimally resolve our needs. They instead tend to normalize the tolerable pain of our unmet needs. They rarely if ever incentivize us to endure discomforts long enough to resolve these needs, which would remove cause for pain.

These divisive institutions routinely coerce us to prefer the pain we feel over the pain we fear. We come to see them as the best or only option to cope with the constant ringing alarm of our unmet needs. But letting them incite us into taking sides against teach other to ease our pain tends to leave us in more pain.

Pain is not the problem as much as the threats your pain exists to report. Divisive institutions regularly leave such threats in place. Then benefit from keeping you attached to their insidious machinations. Until you eventually get disgusted and start seeing them less as a solution and more as part of the problem.

Reactive Problem

Legitimacy naturally declines the more it coerces us into relying upon it to ease the pain of our unmet needs over resolving those needs. The more we wake up to realize such institutions coax our dependency to ease the pain from conditions it helps create, the less we can trust them. Especially when we realize that the more they benefit from keeping us unwell, the more blind they are to their own conflicts of interest.

Let’s unpack the problem of avoidant adversarialism in each mass institution.

• Legacy media. To attract your attention, mainstream media outlets segment you as a part of a marketable audience. They incentivize you into indulgent side-taking to avoid empathizing with each other. You get a biased perspective, which erodes their trustworthiness as a reliable source of news.

• Representative democracy. To attract political support, elected leaders tend to cater to what they think you want over what you actually need. They routinely avoid facing your real-life issues as potentially costing them politically. They tend to favor donors’ interests over yours, which erodes their trustworthiness as a reliable local leader.

• Polarizing politics. To attract voters, candidates take stances on those politicized issues they believe will draw you and a majority of others to the polls. They pit you against others with a different inflexible priority of needs, to trap you into unwinnable conflicts. As your politicized needs and the needs of others remain mostly unresolved, politician’s trustworthiness erodes.

• Adversarial judiciary. To win in a court battle, lawyers on each side try to manipulate you into accept their interpretations of the available facts. They expect you and the other side to remain at mutually defensive odds, avoiding relevant details that could actually resolve your conflict. Their emphasis of procedural fairness over just outcomes erodes confidence in the courts.

The more these divisive institutions get in the way of letting you resolve your needs, the less objectively legitimate in the eyes of anankelogy and need-response.

Responsive Solution

Need-response lays out a path for authority figures and institutions to earn the right to affect your needs. You and others evaluate an authority’s reliability to impact your objective needs. You empirically evaluate their actions and then categorize them on one of five legitimacy levels.

• Offensive illegitimacy. Authority harms the vulnerable, provoking more needs than helping to resolve. E.g., divisive law enforcement violently suppressing peaceful antiwar protesters.

• Substandard legitimacy. Authority acknowledges the needs they impact but only offers to pacify the pain instead of resolving such needs. E.g., law enforcement stops a thief from stealing your property without protecting your property from further thefts.

• Standard legitimacy. Authority demonstrates mutual regard that openly relates to everyone’s needs as worthy of the same respect as their own needs. E.g., law enforcement officers confront apparent law breakers as they would have any other officer confront their wrongdoing.

• Competitive legitimacy. Authority addresses their constituents’ needs more effectively than others to improve own professional reputation. E.g., law enforcement coordinates with community support organizations to reduce or eliminate common contributors to violence, so that together they can demonstrate their community is safer than other communities with a more passive aggressive law enforcement approach.

• Transformative legitimacy. Authority proactively addresses needs by transforming constraining norms into something more responsive to everyone’s needs. E.g., law enforcement officers walk a beat and get to know each community member on a more personal level, sometimes going out of their way to help someone with a personal problem.

You learn to incentivize authority without being adversarial. You model the mutuality that we seek from them. You develop the skills to speak truth to power by first offering helpful feedback to your peers. You nurture each other’s “responsive reputation”.

You effectively compete with the disappointing results of adversarial authority. If your actions can measurably result in more resolved needs, such as a measurable reduction in addictive behaviors, you create value we all need. And authority needs. We raise the bar.