G05 Law Principle

Which do you think is more likely?

Trust social norms and enforcement by rational authorities to keep our emotions in check.

OR

Resolve our needs more fully to cultivate our emotions to act more properly apart from norms.

Anankelogy

While emotions personally convey needs, laws impersonally convey needs. While emotions alert you to needs from within, laws alert you to needs from without. While emotions draw attention to mostly your own affected needs, laws draw attention mostly to the needs of others.

Apart from needs, there are no human laws. Your needs and my needs create purpose for laws. So let’s focus more on the needs our laws exist to serve.

The more we rely on laws, the less we get to know each other’s particular needs. We may vainly expect laws to address everything others do that affect us. Then face repeated disappointment.

Need-response aims to complement—or compete if necessary—our overburdened legal institutions. The judiciary and politics were never created to address all of our needs.

Religion and community traditionally covered what the law could not. Modernity upends the central role of religion in many societies. And replaced our sense of local community with normalized alienation. Need-response presents the potential to fill that gap.

Need-response

Need-response aims to complement legal institutions, like the judiciary and political institutions. We introduce them to the grounding principle of inflexible needs. In other words, that every need exists as an objective fact.

We define “need” narrowly with social science rigor. Anankelogically defines need as anything essential for functioning. You require water to exist, so you need water. You don’t require the bottle to hold that water, as you can get it other ways, so this anankelogically not a need, but merely a preference.

Essentially, a “need” is movement to enable functioning. We draft and enforce laws to motivate cooperation for enabling each other’s functioning. Laws tend to serve as external motivators, in contrast to love as the most powerful internal motivator. And that can create a problem.

Reactive Problem

The more dependent on laws to convey our needs, the greater the disappointment. Especially when counting on the popular adversarial approach enflaming many of our conflicts.

• We impersonally expect others to take full responsibility for their actions, ignoring the context of their limited options.

• We impersonally insist others suppress the emotional intensity of their unmet needs, vainly expecting rationality to hide such uncomfortable realities.

• We impersonally demand others accept our self-affirming generalities, neglecting the nuance shaping each other’s specific needs.

• We impersonally avoid the unpleasant realities of how we affect their inflexible needs, overlooking how unmet needs traps us in pain we keep hoping in vain to avoid.

• We impersonally oppose others in the name of taking a firm stance, unwittingly provoking each other’s defensiveness when compelled to dig in our heels to guard our inflexible needs.

Our adversarial legal institutions of the judiciary and politics fail to recognize these patterns. While their legalists mean well, they often reinforce conflicts with their adversarial approach. Need-response offers a compelling alternative that can actually lead to more peace and security, by addressing each other’s underlying needs.

Responsive Solution

With its more disciplined approach to address inflexible needs fueling conflicts, need-response raises itself to a higher moral standard than mere law enforcement. To incentivize responsiveness to each other’s inflexible affected needs, need-response introduces response enforcement.

As currently envisioned, response enforcement progresses in seven stages.

1. Revisit best practices. We look at ethical standards, industry best practices, licensing boards and such. In contrast to the legalist approach, we cultivate a nonadversarial process.

2. Exhaust established accountabilities. We also invite any internal accountabilities to responding to affected needs. If unresponsiveness to inflexible needs, we move beyond legalist options.

3. Introduce "law-fit". We tie any cited norm or law to the needs it’s meant to serve. We melt the alienation of impersonal laws.

4. Coordinate civil disobedience. If still unresponsive to inflexible needs, we attract widening support to defy illicit norms. We challenge impersonal laws to resolve needs as much as need-response can.

5. Escrow tax liabilities. We put our money where our mouth is. We deposit our tax liabilities into an independent account, automatically released to public coffers when they accountably respond to the public needs they exist to serve.

6. Launch a scorn campaign. We hold all authorities personally and professionally accountable to wellness outcomes. We shun the resistant. We may ostracize the stubborn. And potentially mortify (or count as dead to us) the most violent of illicit authorities.

7. Go full on response enforcement. We must resolve inflexible needs by any proper means necessary. We hold all, including ourselves, to empirically measurable wellness outcomes. If legalists resist such accountability, they lose legitimacy to affect us at all.

As Jefferson wrote in the U.S. Declaration of Independence: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

Instead of abolishing any current government or shifting to a new form of governance, need-response positions itself as a competive alternative to legalism. It can either complement or compete with law enforcement. We cannot sit idle as toxic legalism destroys humanity.

Need-response has yet to test these options. But something like it is desperately needed to fill the gaps exposed by our failing impersonal law-based institutions. Because your inflexible personal needs matter much more than flexible impersonal laws.

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:

• We still need laws to preserve law and order, don’t we?

• Who keeps need-response professionals accountable to affected needs?

• How can a nonadversarial alternative be more effective than adversarial justice?

• I can a competitive alternative helping but suspect the powers that be would shut it down.

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.