B03 Basic Principle

Which do you think is more likely?

You only feel like you must prioritize something because you’re basically an irrational being.

OR

Your life includes a built-in mechanism to ensure your existence before all else.

Anankelogy

Your emotions typically convey the intensity and urgency of a need. If experiencing mild anxiety, for example, you can usually focus on other things. But if paralyzed by panic from a deadly threat which is about to hit you, you can hardly think about anything other than what you must do to survive.

This could also occur in mild incidents. For example, you can be generous to others to a point. But if giving everything away to the point you have nothing left to live upon, your emotions will kick in to warnof this threat to your survival. Whether mild depression or encroaching anxiety, your life prioritizes your capacity to continue existing.

You can feel happy in one moment and then abruptly feel frightened when threatened. That fear prioritizes your attention to handle whatever now threatens your continuance. This spans from ensuring you do not get killed in that moment to avoiding any later risk of harm that could eventually limit your ability to fully function.

Need-response

Need-response counters the limits of impersonal law that often overlooks actual threats to wellbeing. Impersonal legal systems tend to neglects the objective reality of the unchosen needs of all impacted by a conflict.

The more ignored, the more adversarial legal systems tend to prioritize one party’s needs over the other. Both in a court battle and at the ballot. The winner in a legal battle cannot be assured their needs resolve. Political or judicial victories do not always lead to better lives.

Usually, the victory only provides some relief from the pain of their negatively impacted needs. Only by ensuring a path for all sides in a conflict can resolve their objectively prioritized needs can a sustainable solution be achieved for lasting peace.

Reactive Problem

The more we rely on adversarial legal systems, like the adversarial judicial system and polarizing politics, the more we tend to overlook this prioritizing force of self-continuance. No law can curb a person’s prioritized self-continuance when threatened.

Legal systems suffer from a lack of legitimacy when trying to impose its will to coerce suppression of an unchosen need for continued existence. No one chooses to require security, or safety from violence, or avoidance of overwhelming pain from damage. Provoking such needs in the name of authority, especially if evoking reactions it seeks to put down, reflects poorly on its legitimacy.

The more our adversarial legal systems neglect the forceful prioritization of existence, either on a personal or collective level, the more the forces of nature will overrule the forces of human authority. Resorting to violence to put down violence easily risks more violence.

What such blind authority reactively resists they tend to reinforce, getting more of what they claim to seek to reduce. Familiarity bias tends to normalize the resulting cycle of violence, often displacing more responsive alternatives.

Responsive Solution

Need-response goes to the core of a conflict by addressing each unchosen need and each unchosen priority presented in that conflict. These are kept distinct from chosen responses to such needs.

To effectively address the clashing responses to each other’s unchosen needs, need-response applies some familiar qualities it calls character refunctions.

• Grace: Invite all parties in a conflict to humbly admit their imperfections, to then reach them where they honestly at in their struggle to address their prioritized needs with questionable actions.

• Empathy: Encourage each side in a conflict to see the experience through the eyes of the other, to relate more directly to the affected unchosen needs of the opposing side or sides.

• Humility: Welcome each side to drop any pretense that they know best what should be done, to allow room to learn how each one’s ability to function is honestly impacted by the conflict.

• Mercy: Incentivize each side to let go of any right to retribution to make room to repair any damage and restore mutual respect for each other’s unchosen needs.

• Discipline: See that each delays any immediate gratification of their anger so they can prioritize mutual respect that can in the long term assure less provocation of prioritized self-continuance.

• Gratitude: Inspire each side to appreciate the generosityfrom the other side when they show deference to their affected unchosen needs.

• Resilience: Hold each side accountable to enduring the challenging difficulties as long as humanly possible to optimize the opportunity to support each other’s prioritized continuance.

There are many more of these that can help resolve a conflict. And curb the extremes that can erupt when urgently seeking one’s own survival, or reduction from the risk of harm. Need-response can tailorize each one of these to apply to a specific conflict you find yourself in.

In the heated moment of prioritizing self-existence, these qualities can quickly go by the wayside. Need-response can turn a challenging conflict into an opportunity for mutual support with these aptly applied qualities. To prioritize the power of love over coercive laws.

Whenever someone’s prioritizing self-continuance gets provoked, need-response offers better tools than adversarial legal systems to ensure each other’s affected needs can resolve. Then to remove the cause for pain that often provokes conflicts. In the process, the improves each other’s level of functioning to ensure they can prioritize mutual support from that point forward.

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:

• In the heat of the moment, who can do anything but defend oneself?

• What about the rationalizations we use when feeling threatened by some foe?

• Poor judgment lets some folks feel like their survival is threatened when it actually is not.

• How does need-response specifically provide these responses to a conflict I am in?

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.