F05 Authority Principle

Which do you think is more likely?

It’s hopeless to convince the powerful to respond better to your needs.

OR

Affirming the needs of the powerful can incentivize them to affirm yours.

Anankelogy

If you are in a position of power, then you likely realize this truism: You don’t know what you don’t know. You likely also appreciate the challenge of seeking answers if you don’t even know what to effectively ask.

You could invite feedback to your leadership’s effectiveness, but you likely only hear crickets. Those subject to your authority likely keep their distance. And they often hold you to unrealistic expectations, like hoping you can read their minds to know their day-to-day needs.

You likely hold unrealistic expectations of them. You expect them to follow your orders without question. Or at least with minimal resistance, so you accomplish the demands of those in authority over you.

You tend to bias the needs of those in higher authority over the needs of those reporting to your authority. But all natural needs sit equal before nature. Your subordinates cannot adequately function for you if too many of their vulnerable needs get ignored.

As far as you know, you can be doing a top-notch job. But abruptly hell breaks loose. What went wrong? You’re doing everything right, as far as you know, and something still falls apart.

Need-response can help you in ways no other professional resource can. We incentivize those you impact to speak truth to power to respectfully provide you useful impact data. This incentivizes you to listen to those impacted. Only need-response cultivates this win-win environment.

Need-response

Need-response can complement law enforcement. Or compete with unresponsive law enforcement. Likewise, it can either complement your authority or compete with it, based on the objective outcomes produced.

Need-response asserts the higher authority of resolving needs. If those you impact optimally resolve more needs than you in measurable ways, we invite your support or challenge your legitimacy.

Without the discipline of need-responsiveness, authorities everywhere rapidly lose sufficient legitimacy in the eyes of the impacted. The rule based international order appears to be collapsing. Elites relying on manipulation to corral compliance no longer works. The standards for impacting us continue to rise.

Need-response seeks to support a new mindset of leadership. Instead of hating on elites or rebelling against authorities, need-response reaches out to unresponsive leaders to provide the anankelogical tools to be more measurable responsive.

That may require some massive shifts in your understanding of once widely accepted norms. For example, the manipulation of representative democracy into something that no longer represents the interests or needs of the people. Your needs and our needs cannot be manipulated by feigned choices.

Reactive Problem

Reality is not a democracy. The objective fact of each other’s needs, and each other’s priority of needs, cannot be legitimately subjected to a ballot.

Attempts to coerce others to change what their inflexible needs risks undermining the true intent of democracy. Save democracy for shaping policies to respond to needs. And not to attempts to contest the needs themselves.

The more you reactively resist with authority, the more pushback you inevitably get. Violence is not the answer, even if ordered from above.

A violent authority cannot legitimately call for nonviolence while benefiting from their violence against those they insist shall stay nonviolent. Cui bono? Quite the opposite, that incites a struggle for self-preservation that risks slipping into violence.

When an authority incites such desperate reaction and then tries to crush it, anankelogy asserts that it loses its exclusive claim for the use of violence. You can find this principle baked into the U.S. Declaration of Independence. And grounded in passage of the 2nd Amendment.

While you may mean well, and act with the best of intensions, your imposition of authority tends to extract value instead of creating value. The less those you impact can resolve their needs, the less capable they can function well enough to meet your expectations for social order.

Institutions everywhere are losing sufficient legitimacy the more they alienate themselves from self-awareness. Whenever any authority benefits from holding back those under their thumb, revolution could be sparked right around the corner.

Responsive Solution

Let’s now get right to how this principle can solve that problem. . For now, this serves as placeholder text. When I find the time, I will post the full deal here.

How does this speak to your experience of needs?