G01 Law Principle

Which do you think is more likely?

Every law exists as a literal extension of authority to maintain the social order.

OR

Every law serves as a metaphor for the public-facing needs it exists to address.

Anankelogy

We widely agree that no one sits above the law, not even elected rulers nor constitutional monarchs. We widely agree that we all sit equal under the authority of law, so that no one can rise to influential power and dictate their arbitrary will to us.

But taken to extremes, authorities coerce us to submit to laws to serve their own ends. If no one is literally above the law, does this allow those we trust to create, interpret and enforce the law to effectively sit above us? Can any law legitimately require you to go against your ability to function well enough to obey these laws?

You could never obey a law that required you to hold your breath for five minutes, or forced you to replace drinking water with wood alcohol, or required you to defy gravity at will. You cannot make gravity go upward to fit some arbitrary law. You cannot obey any law that prevents you from being able to continue obeying laws, since you would soon no longer be around to obey laws.

Law-based authority loses its legitimacy the more it undermines your capacity to effectively respond to the needs all laws exist to serve. For example, the more you get exorbitantly fined to the point you can no longer afford to survive, the less such authority serves its need-responsive purpose.

Similarly, you cannot easily submit to laws requiring you to rearrange your priority of needs to fit someone else’s preferences. Yet that is exactly what toxic laws require from many of us. Laws speak to our flexible behaviors and never to the objective reality of our inflexible needs, nor to our inflexible priorities. That fuels a huge chunk of our political polarization.

Need-response

Anankelogy recognizes how your natural needs do sit above the law. Whatever naturally exists prior to human governance—to which laws are created to serve—sits above those laws. We cannot force the objective reality of nature to serve the subjective whims of human wants and desires, no matter how powerful the authority insisting on such demands.

How we act puts the impact of our behavior under the law. But the natural needs and natural priority of needs actually sit abovethe law. If obeying every law prevents you from being able to fully function, then the problem is not you but the law. . Or what anankelogy identifies as toxic legalism.

Reactive Problem

Toxic legalism easily overlooks the subservience of flexible law to inflexible needs. Toxic legalism risks undermining the purpose of law in five key ways.

1. Hyper-individualism. The law aptly presumes individual moral agency. Legalism expects you to individualistically obey laws while neglecting the impactful context of socioenvironmental factors restricting your full moral agency. Legalism expects you to be an island.

2. Hyperrationality. Our laws spring from what Weber called rational-legal authority, Legalism expects you to rationally decide what is best for others without personally relating to their emotionally charged needs. Legalism incentives you to rationalize.

3. Relief-generalizing. We keep laws intentionally vague to be broadly applicable. And the law generally emphasizes harm reduction. Legalism incentivizes overgeneralizing for relief from the pain of your unmet needs, often to the point of neglecting such needs. Those unmet needs Legalism perpetuates pain you feel you must repeatedly avoid.

4. Avoidance. We keep laws intentionally impersonal to curtail their biased enforcement. The more personally the enforcer knows you, the higher the chance they’ll overlook your infractions. And that’s just not fair. Legalism turns such careful detachment into careless alienation. It normalizes disengagement. It expects the law to be enough to address almost any situation. This incentivizes you to hold unrealistic expectations towards others, who likewise hold unrealistic expectations of you. Legalism avoids personally engaging each other’s ongoing needs.

5. Adversarialism. We keep laws intentionally adversarial toward lawbreakers. Laws incentivize public respect for your exposed needs by promising to punish any noncompliance. Legalism normalizes such hostilities to the point of hindering cooperation and mutual understanding of each other. It has you continually viewing others as acting in bad faith when they actually could have good intentions toward you. You squash their good intentions when adversarialism prods you to distrust them and oppose them on a whim. Legalism prematurely pits us against each other in ways that promote mutual defensiveness.

The more we mindless assert the supremacy of law, the more we objectify and dehumanize each other. Often to the benefit of law-based elites. And grave costs to our wellbeing.

Responsive Solution

Need-response doesn’t disregard law, but goes beyond mere impersonal laws. Need-response fulfills the purpose of law by directly engaging the needs laws exist to serve. 

Need-response answers the problem of toxic legalism by countering each of its five excesses.

• Replaces hyper-individualism with psychosocial balance. Need-response respects every individual within the context of impactful social systems and impactful environments beyond one’s personal control. Need-response balances an internal focus with an external focus to identify all contributors to a problem. Instead of objectifying you as an island, you’re treated holistically.

• Replaces hyper-rationality with respected vulnerability. Need-response encourages us all to acknowledge and affirm the less rational objective needs. We separate out how their expressed subjectively in our emotions. We make it safe for each other to drop their guard and honestly admit their challenging experiences. Instead of hiding behind reasoned arguments, you openly relate vulnerably to each other’s inflexible needs.

• Replaces relief-generalizing with relevant specifics. Need-response inspires you to let go of distracting generalizations to appreciate more of the nuance affecting your needs. It cultivates your relational orientation from outmoded generalizations toward relevant specifics affecting your needs. Instead of legalism’s overextended vagueness, you drill down to the specifics necessary to resolve needs, remove pain and restore wellness.

• Replaces avoidance with engagement. Need-response inspires you to benefit from the purpose of your pain, to resolve more needs that can remove cause for pain. It cultivates your easement orientation from relieving your pain toward embracing your natural pain as an essential process for resolving your needs. Instead of legalism’s overblown avoidance, you get to know each other’s overlooked needs so you can resolve them, remove their pain and restore each other’s wellness.

• Replaces adversarialism with mutuality. Need-response inspires you to switch from reflexively opposing your foes to intuitively distinguishing their unchosen needs from their chosen responses to them. It cultivates your conflict orientation away from mutual defensiveness toward mutual understanding, mutual engagement, and potential for mutual support. Instead of legalism’s overreach sparking perpetual mistrust, you develop the mutuality essential to more fully resolve each other’s needs, remove cause for each other’s pain and mutually restore each other’s wellness.

After all, laws by themselves do not resolve needs; we do. Laws can be as arbitrary as much as the subjective ways you behave toward your needs. The needs themselves start as objective fact. And that sets our inflexible needs above flexible law.

Need-response upends the norms expecting compliance to laws by asserting the higher standard of properly resolving each other’s needs. Legalism’s harm reduction standard too easily perpetuates pain by neglecting the underlying needs prompting our pain. Need-response serves the needs for which laws exist.

No one’s impactful behavior sits above the law. But then no law sits above one’s objective needs behind that behavior. Accountability is less about compliance to manipulable law, and more to the bottom line of our measurable wellness outcomes. The better we can resolve our own needs without hindering others—or by supporting each other’s needs—the more the issues of law can naturally take care of themselves.

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:

• You try disobeying a law and see what happens!

• Following laws seems so much easier than trying to figure out each other’s fickle needs.

• I doubt if Teddy Roosevelt meant the law itself must sit above human existence.

• The law sits above rhetorical needs; laws can govern if trusting water from a bottle or faucet.

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.