E07 Conflict Principle

Which do you think is more likely?

You are fully responsible for every facet of your decisions in life.

OR

Your responsibility can stretch no further than your response-ability.

Anankelogy

Anankelogy alerts you to a tempting pull to vacillate between extremes. The less your needs resolve, the more prone to seek relief by trying something opposite of what seems to be wrong. You generalize for relief the more you’re in pain from unmet pressing needs.

If you feel you’ve indulged too much on your self-needs (e.g., personal freedom, autonomy, privacy), you may react by indulging more of your social needs (e.g., family ties, social acceptance, group cohesion). If you don’t balance the two, you switch one problem for another.

The more your indulged self-needs provoke the scorn of others, the more your regret alerts you to the rights of others. You may then feel some guilt for your lapse in responsibility.

A right speaks to your responsiveness to their needs. For example, they have a right not to be violated by you. A responsibility speaks to your responsiveness to your own needs. You have a responsibility to attend to your own needs in a way that doesn’t violate others.

Need-response

Law-based institutions of politics, law enforcement and the judiciary typically fail to appreciate this tension between your rights and your responsibilities. They readily overgeneralize rights over responsibilities in some instances while overgeneralizing responsibilities over rights in other situations.

Those institutions take a win-lose approach to offer relief from the pain of your unmet needs. Need-response applies a much higher standard. We take a win-win approach that seeks to resolve each other’s affected needs. The more needs we resolve, the more we remove cause for pain.

Need-response drills down to the specific self-needs and social-needs affected in a conflict. Need-response understands how easy we can be pulled into vacillating extremes that traps us in pain. And denies us our full potential.

Reactive Problem

Law-based institutions benefit when our needs do not fully resolve. Take politics for example. The politician gains by overgeneralizing rights and responsibilities. They stay in power the more we have to rely on these institutions to sort out the painful consequences of our underserved needs.

Not that they try to keep us down. It’s a built-in feature of the adversarial law process and not a bug. It buys into the rationalism myththat reduces you and I into rational actors making choices based on rationally created laws. That completely overlooks how our experience of needs drives our behavior much more than law or rational thinking. And that fuels many politicized issues.

For example, intersectionalityas an academic theory gets castigated when it devolves into what many smear as “oppression Olympics”. It’s one thing to appreciate complicated forms of historical disadvantage. It’s quite another to be told you must cater to those in the group who’ve claimed they’ve suffered the most marginalization.

Intersectionality identifies the unique experience of those with overlapping categories of social disadvantage or advantage. The transwoman of color, for example, encounter forms of discrimination distinct from the forms of discrimination against ciswomen, and against white transwoman.

She may not want to be singled out as the one who should speak first. She may not seek to replace one hierarchy (last to be let in) with another (first to speak about painfully experienced forms of oppression). Nor does she want to publicly oppose these allies when allies are few.

This critical version of intersectionality, developed by feminist academic Kimberlé Crenshaw, often gets watered down into a “layperson” popgen version. Especially by those most traumatized by such historical discrimination. Trauma survivors gravitate toward relief-generalizingthat insists others do whatever would reduce their pain, or reduce risk for further pain. Too often, this excludes removing cause for pain by addressing the needs on all sides.

Consequently, each side asserts their rights with less emphasis on their responsibilities. Each side selfishly claims they are right and the other side is completely wrong. Neither side will honestly and humbly engage the exposed needs of the other. If your rights are more important than your responsibilities, you willingly wait for the other to act in your favor.

Meanwhile, the academic discipline of descriptive over normative tends to invert into normative over descriptive. Discipline goes out the window on both sides. Little to no empathy is afforded to these traumatized survivors of overlapping discrimination. And little to no empathy is granted to those losing their autonomy when socially pressured to placate the most marginalized in the room.

Responsive Solution

Need-response identifies the root to this rights-responsibilities tension in your “psychosocial orientation”. We each routinely resolve more self-needs than social needs, or more social-needs than self-needs. We either enjoy more autonomy and personal space than social acceptance and group inclusion. Or we enjoy more social acceptance and close family ties than autonomy and privacy.

You express the priorities of your inward psychosocial orientation through your outward political orientation. You experience an inflexible priority of needs at odds with those of a contrary orientation.

The more your self-needs resolve more than your social-needs, the more you gravitate toward liberal or progressive views. You accept how you are uniquely different and seek policies to compel others to accept your social rights for greater inclusion.

The more your social-needs resolve more than your self-needs, the more you gravitate toward conservative views. You enjoy close social ties with others and seek policies to guard your personal rights.

The less your self-needs or your social needs resolve, the more pain you suffer. Your body continues to warn you with such pain that it cannot fully function until those needs are met. You either resolve those pain-reported needs to remove cause for pain, or you seek relief from pain that usually leaves those needs unresolved to give you more pain.

Integrating your responsiveness to the inflexible needs of others (i.e., their rights) with your responsiveness to your own inflexible needs (i.e., your response-ability), enables you to cultivate psychosocial balance. You take the lead to resolve needs to remove cause for pain.

Instead of waiting in vain for others to respect your rights, need-response provides you the tool of social love to first honor the rights of others even if they’ve yet to fully honor yours. You remove your exposure to the fickleness of others’ responsiveness so you can more freely balance your rights and responsibilities.

The more you can honor the rights of others, the easier to sustain your own responsibilities. The more you keep up with your responsibilities, the easier to sustain honoring the rights of others. When kept out of the clutches of selfish politicking, both work hand in hand.

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:

• I find it impossible to honor the rights of others who completely violate my rights.

• Can we make a distinction between legitimate responsibilities and fake ones?

• How can I be more understanding of the other political side when they won’t even listen to me?

• There’s more to unpack in this issue around intersectionality and identity politics.

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.