Power Problems Power problems occur when impactors impede impactees trying to properly resolve needs . power problems & power-impacted needs properly resolving needs Power problem ID: A05 Universal Cultural Incompetence Insensitive to valuable differences cultural incompetence cultural competency < previous next > Cultural Incompetence Neglecting the impactee’s culturally different values or perspectives, where the impactor potentially pressures the impactee to fit into their cookie cutter cultural norms. The impactee may rightly fear some form of retribution for not fitting into the impactor’s cultural expectation. Or feel their full value remains overlooked and their contributions routinely neglected. cultural competency The further along the cultural competence continuum , the more trustworthy the impactor to those vulnerable impactees who valuably exist and properly act outside of mainstream cultural norms. Whether a healthcare provider or a different impactor, the impactor's responsiveness to impactee cultural differences fall along a recognized continuum: Stage 1. Cultural Destructiveness Stage 2. Cultural Incapacity Stage 3. Cultural Blindness Stage 4. Cultural Precompetence Stage 5. Cultural Competence and Proficiency Need-response can guide the targeted impactor to improve their cultural competency by walking them through the need-response process with an impactee. The impactor learns to appreciate the impactee's hidden value and how to properly address anything that is not appropriate simply because it is culturally different. The impactee can then contribute more of their full value when free to be their authentic selves. And their differentness can invite the impactor to inquire if the impactee sees something that the impactor cannot through the lens of their own familiarity bias. The impactor then earns legitimacy to reliably impact impactees who are culturally different from oneself. And gain competitive legitimacy when tapping into impactees' unique perspectives. Cultural Incompetence Corrupting Influence Cognitive Contraction Coercive Compliance Coerced Poor Options Dependence

Power Problems Power problems occur when impactors impede impactees trying to properly resolve needs . power problems & power-impacted needs properly resolving needs Power problem ID: A05 Universal Cultural Incompetence Insensitive to valuable differences cultural incompetence cultural competency < previous next > Cultural Incompetence Neglecting the impactee’s culturally different values or perspectives, where the impactor potentially pressures the impactee to fit into their cookie cutter cultural norms. The impactee may rightly fear some form of retribution for not fitting into the impactor’s cultural expectation. Or feel their full value remains overlooked and their contributions routinely neglected. cultural competency The further along the cultural competence continuum , the more trustworthy the impactor to those vulnerable impactees who valuably exist and properly act outside of mainstream cultural norms. Whether a healthcare provider or a different impactor, the impactor's responsiveness to impactee cultural differences fall along a recognized continuum: Stage 1. Cultural Destructiveness Stage 2. Cultural Incapacity Stage 3. Cultural Blindness Stage 4. Cultural Precompetence Stage 5. Cultural Competence and Proficiency Need-response can guide the targeted impactor to improve their cultural competency by walking them through the need-response process with an impactee. The impactor learns to appreciate the impactee's hidden value and how to properly address anything that is not appropriate simply because it is culturally different. The impactee can then contribute more of their full value when free to be their authentic selves. And their differentness can invite the impactor to inquire if the impactee sees something that the impactor cannot through the lens of their own familiarity bias. The impactor then earns legitimacy to reliably impact impactees who are culturally different from oneself. And gain competitive legitimacy when tapping into impactees' unique perspectives. Cultural Incompetence Corrupting Influence Cognitive Contraction Coercive Compliance Coerced Poor Options Dependence

Resolving needs improves wellness. < Back B01 Basic Principle List of all principles Resolving needs improves wellness. Image: Pixabay – Bessi (click on meme to see source image) Summary Wellness is another word for function. All needs exist to serve function. The more you resolve your needs, the better you can function. The more you eat well, the better you can function. You eat, breathe, connect with friends and enjoy moments of solitude all for the sake of being able to function through life. The less your needs resolve, or the less you attend to your prioritized needs, the less you can function. Or the less well you will be. Where there is no function to serve, there is no need. Description Which do you think is more likely? Your ability to function has little to nothing to do with your needs. OR Your ability to function has everything to do with your needs. Anankelogy This unique understanding of your needs recognizes that your every need relates to your ability to function. The less your needs resolve, the less you can function. And the closer to being unwell. The more your needs resolve, the better you can function and be well. Accessible anankelogy refers to your level of functioning simply as wellness . Recognizing your wellness exists in gradient levels provides us with a deeper understanding. Anankelogy identifies four key levels of your ability to function . Peakfunction : When you prioritize to promptly and fully resolve your needs. You reach more of your full potential. You enjoy sustainable wellness. Symfunction : When you prioritize pragmatically easing your needs with help from others. You can sufficiently function. Just not at your best. Dysfunction : When you prioritize relieving the pain of your many unresolved needs. You can hardly function. You typically cope with something addictive. Misfunction : When you prioritize survival from too many unresolved basic needs. You barely hang onto life. You find yourself repeatedly at death’s door. A need can be appreciated as a kind of metaphor for function. The more your need for water is satisfied, the better you can function. The less your body’s requirement for water can be satiated, the less you can function. If you cannot satisfy your thirst, you will find yourself obsessing for something to drink. While you experience these subjectively, they begin from the objective reality for your life’s requirement for something to function. This applies equally to your emotional needs. If you cannot satisfy your longing to be understood and appreciated by those closest to you, you will find yourself obsessing to be accepted. You must receive some social connection to function, or you will remain in the pain of loneliness. Anankelogy recognizes a range between illness and wellness . Instead of suddenly becoming sick, you gradually lose the ability to function. You regressively shift from wellness into illness when your needs do not or cannot fully resolve. Need-response This new profession of need-response applies this central anankelogy principle. It can either complement or compete with other service institutions. Need-response can complement the psychological focus of psychotherapy by adding the essential dimension of responding to the needs that the mind processes. Need respond can complement law enforcement and the judicial process, and even politics. Or it can compete with these institutions by creating better results when addressing the needs for which they ostensibly exist. Reactive Problem These service institutions of law and psychotherapy tend to follow the popular norm of relieving pain over addressing the needs prompting such pain. The more a court battle or ballot contest offers mere relief for the pain of publicly affected needs, the less we can function. We tend to accept such relief is the best we can get. We accommodate to lower levels of being able to function. We cope with the increasingly pain of these unmet needs. We also get angrier and angrier at each other. Responsive Solution The more inspired to endure the discomfort of working through the painful portion of fully addressing our needs, the more we can fully resolve them. Pain is not the problem as much as the threat such pain exists to report . The further you can remove the threat prompting the pain, the better you can function. The more your needs resolve, the more your wellness improves. Once your functioning gets restored, the more capable of removing other threats. You then become less vulnerable to coping habits like addictions. As your wellness—your level of functioning—improves, the more your anger can shift toward grace, peace and love. The more your needs resolve, the more wellness you enjoy. 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: How can this apply equally to a physical need and an emotional need like the need for love? How long do I have to put up with the pain before I can enjoy restored functioning? Isn’t short-term pain relief okay, or is the only path toward better functioning is costly pain? If I’m already trapped in addictive patterns, how can this insight help me climb out of them? 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. Engage this principle in our forum Engagement guide Any visitor to the Engagement forum can view all posts. So do keep that in mind when posting. Sign up or sign in to comment on these posts and to create your own posts. Using this platform assumes you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . Remember to keep the following in mind: Quote the principle you are responding to, and its identifier letter & number. Let’s be specific. Demonstrate need-responsiveness in your interactions here. Let’s respect each other. Engage supportive feedback from others on this platform. Let’s grow together. Together, let’s improve our need-responsiveness . Together, let’s spread some love . See other principles in this category - Foundational - Basic - General - Pain - Conflict - Authority - Law - Love - Previous Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link Next

Laws impersonally convey needs. < Back G05 Law Principle List of all principles Laws impersonally convey needs. Image: Pixabay - LN_Photoart (click on meme to see source image) Summary The less we personally know about the needs of others, the more we rely on impersonal laws to guide our actions toward them. Where emotions personally convey our needs, established norms impersonally convey our needs. Laws are kept vague to apply in various situations, and impersonal to avoid favoritism. Consequently, laws cannot convey our needs as powerfully as our emotions. Description 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. 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. Exhaust established accountabilities. We also invite any internal accountabilities to responding to affected needs. If unresponsiveness to inflexible needs, we move beyond legalist options. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Engage this principle in our forum Engagement guide Any visitor to the Engagement forum can view all posts. So do keep that in mind when posting. Sign up or sign in to comment on these posts and to create your own posts. Using this platform assumes you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . Remember to keep the following in mind: Quote the principle you are responding to, and its identifier letter & number. Let’s be specific. Demonstrate need-responsiveness in your interactions here. Let’s respect each other. Engage supportive feedback from others on this platform. Let’s grow together. Together, let’s improve our need-responsiveness . Together, let’s spread some love . See other principles in this category - Foundational - Basic - General - Pain - Conflict - Authority - Law - Love - Previous Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link Next

Power Problems Power problems occur when impactors impede impactees trying to properly resolve needs . power problems & power-impacted needs properly resolving needs Power problem ID: A05 Universal Cultural Incompetence Insensitive to valuable differences cultural incompetence cultural competency < previous next > Cultural Incompetence Neglecting the impactee’s culturally different values or perspectives, where the impactor potentially pressures the impactee to fit into their cookie cutter cultural norms. The impactee may rightly fear some form of retribution for not fitting into the impactor’s cultural expectation. Or feel their full value remains overlooked and their contributions routinely neglected. cultural competency The further along the cultural competence continuum , the more trustworthy the impactor to those vulnerable impactees who valuably exist and properly act outside of mainstream cultural norms. Whether a healthcare provider or a different impactor, the impactor's responsiveness to impactee cultural differences fall along a recognized continuum: Stage 1. Cultural Destructiveness Stage 2. Cultural Incapacity Stage 3. Cultural Blindness Stage 4. Cultural Precompetence Stage 5. Cultural Competence and Proficiency Need-response can guide the targeted impactor to improve their cultural competency by walking them through the need-response process with an impactee. The impactor learns to appreciate the impactee's hidden value and how to properly address anything that is not appropriate simply because it is culturally different. The impactee can then contribute more of their full value when free to be their authentic selves. And their differentness can invite the impactor to inquire if the impactee sees something that the impactor cannot through the lens of their own familiarity bias. The impactor then earns legitimacy to reliably impact impactees who are culturally different from oneself. And gain competitive legitimacy when tapping into impactees' unique perspectives. Cultural Incompetence Corrupting Influence Cognitive Contraction Coercive Compliance Coerced Poor Options Dependence

You NEED This Introducing anankelogy, the study of need Anankelogy is the brainchild of Steph Turner , author of the book introducing this new academic field. Steph identifies as a transspirit , or someone who feels spiritually compelled to transcend cultural divisions in order to connect more deeply with all of life in order to resolve needs more fully. Steph attributes the bulk of the insights into this new social science to spiritual wisdom. It's a wisdom Steph reports as a series of epiphanies that come naturally after resolving more and more needs. You may realize greater depths of reality that you never thought possible after more of your needs fully resolve. The more we unquestioningly go along with social norms for merely easing our needs or relieving the pain of our unmet needs, the more we see the world through a distorting lens. Anankelogy cuts a clear path through all this fog. Packed with 133 charts and diagrams, You NEED This provides many visual aids to help you see our experience of needs more clearly. Each of the six chapters subdivide into tightly organized sections, and numbered thoroughly for easy reference. No other book makes such clear sense behind our different political views . You NEED This unpacks political views as an outward expression of our inward inflexible priority of needs. Unpacking our polarization is as simple, yet challenging, as love ; of respecting other's different priority of needs as we would have them respect our different priority of needs. Get your own copy of this book to better understand your own needs. Discover what your emotions are truly about. Appreciate our common ground, and our many differences. Replace the misunderstanding fueling popular outrage culture with greater love for one another. Let us all get back to our potential for greater love. Purchase your eBook or paperback copy at Amazon . order on Amazon Anankelogy 101 eCourse

Placeholder Image symfunctional strain symfunctional strain < Back 3 symfunctional strain Symfunctional strain is the ongoing emotional stress from needs not fully resolved, limiting your ability to focus elsewhere and often mistaken as lack of intelligence. Need experience Each need you experience not fully resolved continues to compete for your attention. Compared to your more pressing concerns, most of these partially eased needs sit on the backburner of your conscious awareness. They remain in a queue, until evoked into full focal awareness. Meanwhile, your cognitive bandwidth shrinks . You find you cannot focus as fully and clearly on some things. Your persisting needs pull you for relief. They prioritize your thinking. They bias you. They compel you to do something for their relief, sometimes negatively impacting others outside of your awareness. “You’re being stupid!” they insist. Because it’s easy to conflate this cognitive contraction with lack of intellect, or lack of rational thinking, or with poor choices. They likely suffer this symfunctional strain too. When continually enduring unmet needs as a norm, it’s next to impossible to respect the needs of others. Symfunctional strain can slip into dysfunction, into projecting pain onto others, and other defunctions . Defunctionalizing Refunctionalizing Examples Relational knowing Sign up or sign in to view the full entry Complementary refunctions Conciliatory resolution 6/16/23 Previous Next

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Take the easy course, then life gets hard. Take the hard course, then life gets easy. < Back D08 Pain Principle List of all principles Take the easy course, then life gets hard. Take the hard course, then life gets easy. Image: Pixabay - Sonyuser (click on meme to see source image) Summary The more you indulge yourself to avoid the discomforts of fully resolving your needs, the more your unresolved needs result in lingering pain. The more you face upfront the intense discomforts necessary to fully resolve your needs, the more you will enjoy some long-term fruits and suffer less lingering pain. Your life typically reveals a pattern of favoring one or the other. Description Which do you think is more likely? You pick the low hanging fruit of an easier path in life because of your moral failings. OR You would pursue the challenging path of resolving needs no matter how difficult at first, if this option was more open to you. Anankelogy Anankelogy introduces you to various need-experience orientations . These are relatively fixed ways you experience your familiar needs. This principle speaks to your “easement orientation ”. You’re either oriented to resolve your needs over relieving their pain. You take the hard course first. Or you’re oriented to relieve your pain over resolving the needs causing your pain. You take the easy path first. The less you can fully resolve your needs, the less you can function. Every unresolved need emotionally warns you of its threat to your ability to function. The less you can function over time, the more your pain builds up. The longer you must adjust to this mounting pain, the more you get used to coping with this manageable level of discomfort. If you cannot consistently access what would restore you to full functioning, but must settle on some alternative or substitute to get you by, you naturally become oriented to seek relief over resolving your pounding needs. In other words, it is not always simple to merely choose the challenging path upfront, to decide to endure the difficulties inherent when fully resolving your needs. Your life situation shapes your orientation to your needs. Options to live optimally may remain beyond your reach. Need-response exists to give you optimal choices. So you can accept, with little risk of falling flat, the difficult path upfront to fully resolve needs. Need-response Here is where we apply this principle to improve our need-responding skills. We contrast popular norms creating a feel-reactive problem with our preferable need-responsive solution . Reactive Problem Game theory and rational choice theory provide a helpful framework for understanding the specific choices we make in life. But this approach can offer only part of the picture. Need-response recognizes the role of needs as they actually occur, with empirical evidence. No matter how much you aspire to take the high road of nobly suffering to resolve needs, you likely find yourself having to settle for less. You needless feel guilty if you repeatedly take the law road of self-indulgence to cope somehow with your load of pain of unresolved needs. Responsive Solution Western culture biases us to primarily think of our individual choices. This lens can blind us from how our choices are limited by our social environments. Those able to access more resources to more fully resolve their needs often assume others enjoy about the same level of access. Need-response incentivizes those with greater access to resources to improve accessibility to others less fortunate. Instead of relying on political generalizations or impersonal policies to spread wealth, need-response personally connects the advantaged with the relatively less advantaged. Need-response offers the potential for all to take the challenging path to more fully resolve needs. And offers opportunity for the more advantaged to take the challenging path to support the full resolution of needs of others with a mutually beneficial conciliatory process. Because outrage is never as potent as the powerful incentive of love to mutually resolve each other’s affected needs. 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’ve tried to take this nobler path of accepting difficulties upfront, but find myself repeatedly pulled back to ease my unrelenting pain. I’ve tried this approach of taking the hard road first, but I can’t say it helped me much. I once took the more challenging route of hitting a problem head on and it turned out great. I already orient my life to take the challenging road first, and let me tell you how it really is. 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. Engage this principle in our forum Engagement guide Any visitor to the Engagement forum can view all posts. So do keep that in mind when posting. Sign up or sign in to comment on these posts and to create your own posts. Using this platform assumes you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . Remember to keep the following in mind: Quote the principle you are responding to, and its identifier letter & number. Let’s be specific. Demonstrate need-responsiveness in your interactions here. Let’s respect each other. Engage supportive feedback from others on this platform. Let’s grow together. Together, let’s improve our need-responsiveness . Together, let’s spread some love . See other principles in this category - Foundational - Basic - General - Pain - Conflict - Authority - Law - Love - Previous Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link Next

It is against the grain of law to fully resolve needs. < Back G04 Law Principle List of all principles It is against the grain of law to fully resolve needs. Image: Pixabay – JonnyBelvedere (click on meme to see source image) Summary Laws remain rather vague to apply widely, often focusing on harm reduction. The more dependent on laws to reduce harm or a perceived threat of harm, the more you become a legalist instead of responsive. You then become less attentive to fully resolving needs. Only by properly resolving each other’s needs can we remove threats of harm. The more you acclimate to laws, public policies and social norms to deliver familiar forms of comfort, the more you resist the more responsive who endure the natural discomforts of fully resolving needs. The more the responsive go beyond minimal standards of law to fully resolve needs, the more legalists push back to protect their familiar pain-avoidant norms. Description Which do you think is more likely? Hold accountable anyone defying social norms. OR Better understand why some violations of norms are better than kneejerk compliance. Anankelogy The “law” does not exist to apply to every specific need you have. No law requires you to breathe, or dictates you must first show appreciation for others before you expect their appreciation of you, or obliges you to sleep laying down instead of standing up. Laws apply only to general situations. Covering too many details risks making a law inapplicable or unenforceable. No law requires you to put your keys somewhere you can remember. No law requires you to submit an itinerary to local authorities stating what you specifically expect you’ll be doing every minute of next Tuesday. No law requires you to know exactly when you’ll be using the restroom in the course of the next several days. No law requires you to be healthier a year from now. Anankelogy recognizes how laws must remain vague, impersonal, and adversarial. Laws are kept vague to apply to almost any situation. Which risks being too general to apply to you and your specific needs. Laws are kept impersonal to avoid partiality. Which risks alienating you and your specific needs. Laws are kept adversarial in their enforcement to punish offenders. Which risks premature hostility toward you and your specific needs. Anankelogy’s answer to these built-in limits of law is need-response . Need-response Need-response prioritizes our inflexible needs over our flexible laws. The needs came first. And laws can never keep up with our every need. Nor should they. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn pointed out: “I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is also less than worthy of [humanity]. A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching anything higher fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities.” In other words, legalism impedes human flourishing. The opposite extreme of lawlessness is legalistic tyranny, which ironically hinders your capacity to faithfully oblige every rule. Reactive Problem Anankelogy identifies this excessive role of rules as toxic legalism . You either respond effectively to needs or settle for legalistic norms… to avoid dealing with people’s specific needs with comforting generalities, to ease discomfort of vulnerably relating to messy needs, and then expect established norms to provide an easier path to easing the pain of our unmet needs. Motivated reasoning biases legalists to preserve the familiar yet stifling status quo. To maintain this easier path, legalists tend to resist… any belief-disturbing nuance, discomforting engagement, and then prematurely oppose others outside of their norms of legally privileged pain avoidance. In short, norm-compliant legalists frequently resist those with the wisdom and answer to remove causes of pain . They’re often trapped in a zone of mounting pain , and dare not rock the boat lest they risk more pain. Such legalists easily slide into the creeping normalcy of managing their gradually increasing load of emotional pain. By not recognizing the reported needs behind these uncomfortable emotions, they ironically suffer more emotional pain as those unmet needs painfully insist on some attention. But the more they overlook the needs that their pain exists to report, the more they’re prone to fall back into their managed levels of pain . Legalists tend to resist full wellness. The pain required easily triggers discomfort they feel they must avoid. To them, good is defined generally as avoiding pain. Painful wellness efforts seem bad . They often react to painful norm-transgressing efforts to fully resolve needs. Responsive Solution While no one sits above the law, no law sits above the needs for which they exist to serve . You cannot easily change your inflexible needs to fit flexible laws. The more can directly resolve needs, the less dependent on norms or authority . Need-response holds us to a higher standard than mere legal compliance: resolving needs to improve measurable wellness outcomes. Such as reducing anxiety and depression. And enabling more our potential to be reached. Need-response can inspire us to stretch our comfort zone , to equip us to resolve more needs. So we can courageously endure the discomfort of stepping outside of comforting norms. Instead of selfishly trying to avoid the mounting pain of our unresolved needs, need-response incentivizes us to honor each other’s needs as our own. The more we step outside of ourselves to meaningfully help others to resolve their needs, the more empowered they are to honor our needs. You can call this love . 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: How can we tell the difference between selfish norm-violating and responsive norm-violating? What do you say about those who get punished by legalists for trying to resolve more needs? How can we measure legalist efforts and responsive wellness efforts? How can you resist the government authorities who enforcing stiflingly anti-wellness norms? 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. Engage this principle in our forum Engagement guide Any visitor to the Engagement forum can view all posts. So do keep that in mind when posting. Sign up or sign in to comment on these posts and to create your own posts. Using this platform assumes you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . Remember to keep the following in mind: Quote the principle you are responding to, and its identifier letter & number. Let’s be specific. Demonstrate need-responsiveness in your interactions here. Let’s respect each other. Engage supportive feedback from others on this platform. Let’s grow together. Together, let’s improve our need-responsiveness . Together, let’s spread some love . See other principles in this category - Foundational - Basic - General - Pain - Conflict - Authority - Law - Love - Previous Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link Next