A03 Foundational Principle

Which do you think is more likely?

Whatever degree of wellness or sickness you're in right now is totally a subjective thing.

OR

Your current degree of wellness or sickness is shaped by factors outside of your subjective experience.

Anankelogy

While "level of functioning" or "capacity level to function" sounds more technically accurate, accessible anankelogy considers wellness as the same thing.

You can make a subjective decision to drink water in response to your thirst. But the fact you cannot do much while dehydrated has little if anything to do with your subjective experience. Lack of water will stop you in your tracks.

Sure, you may suffer dehydration as a consequence of a subjective decision. But once your body registers a significant drop in fluidity, your requirement to replenish your body with more water occurs independent of your subjectivity. Your body demands sufficient water in order to function whether you like it or not. Same goes for your nonphysical needs. Like security.

Need-response

Need-response recognizes four levels of functioning. These range from peak wellness to terminal illness.

1. Peakfunction. When you can promptly and fully resolve all of your needs, you can reach your life's full potential. You objectively can function at a high degree.

2. Symfunction. When at best you can ease your needs by partially resolving them, often with the cold cooperation of others, you reach an adequate level of wellbeing. You objectively operate at a level that fits in with most others. Not too bad but not your best.

3. Dysfunction. When you cannot resolve all of your needs or ease them, but increasingly merely relieve the resulting pain, you slip into substandard wellness. You objectively cannot do things you likely could do before, like regulate your emotions or contain your angry outbursts. While seemingly subjective choices, these emerge from an objective core of severely diminished capacity to function.

4. Misfunction. When you cannot address your most basic needs, like hunger, security or social cooperation in a crisis, you slide into a dark place on the cusp of destruction and likely death. You objectively cannot do almost anything, except strive to survive. If that.

Reactive Problem

Social norms assuming each behavior stems from rational choices, regardless of the level of calm or desperation emanating from one's wellness level, creates and perpetuates many problems.

Mixed with the hyper-individualism myth that overlooks the impact from externalities (like getting cut off from food), assuming each one's level of functionality is an individual subjective experience tends to serve the interests of those who gain from other's diminished capacity.

Need-response addresses how power differentials tend to limit how well subordinates can resolve their outward-facing needs. An employee's need to be valued, for example, may decrease less from their valuable contribution and more from the employer shifting priorities to keep pace with a volatile market. Excess attention on the internal subjective aspects risk normalizing unhealthy externalities, like the potential for power differentials to impose poor options.

Responsive Solution

Need-response identifies coerced poor options dependence (or CoPOD for short). As accessible options diminish, one can grow dependent on the most reliably accessible option. Even if substandard. Processed foods, for example, is better than rotten food.

Diminished wellness is not solely a result of making poor choices among stellar options. Dysfunction typically results from matters outside of subjective experience.

Need-response proactively addresses our declining rates of wellness by first addressing the unresolved needs at the core. Not deferring to rules or to reasoning, which typically favors symfunctionality over peakfunctionality.

To resolve those identified needs, we best unpack what can be called react culture. That refers to social or cultural norms that privilege anything less than properly resolving needs.

Most of us feel trapped in what anankelogy identifies as symfunction capture. Fewer of needs fully resolve for reasons beyond our control, so we lack sufficient capacity to properly address our remaining needs. Need-response cuts through this malaise by incentivizing one another to honor the needs of others as one's own. Yeah, to fix problems with the power of love.

Responding to your needs

How does this principle speak to your experience of needs?

• There must be some subjective element or I'd feel utterly powerless.

• What about the role of free will in the level of our wellness?

• Shouldn't laws be enough to secure our optimal wellness?

• Certainly some of our wellness level exists as subjective phenomena.

Instead of selecting one of these, feel free to post your own.