If a problem spins out of your control, does that make you irresponsible?
Anankelogy 101
06 Defunctions
Wellness is psychosocial.
Common defunctions
Introducing defunctions
Biology and psychology speak of pathology and wellness. Anankelogy points to a range of functioning. Biology and psychology suggest a cutoff point between the two, implying a simple good-bad binary. Anankelogy provides four levels of functioning: peakfunction, symfunction, dysfunction, and misfunction.
Biology and psychology look primarily inward, reinforcing the Western bias of ideological individualism (and stigmatizing illness). Anankelogy recognizes wellness is psychosocial, looking inward and outward to contributors to wellbeing. More specifically, that your functioning capacity (i.e., your level of wellness) is an integrated mix of biology, internal cognitive processes including emotions, social impacts, and spirituality.
Where biology and psychology speak of disorder and healing, anankelogy speaks of defunction and refunction—of lowered and raised ability to function. Instead of waiting to address full blown problems, this list catches items slipping into symfunctionality. Instead or risking stigma, such items apply to everyone.
A higher standard
Psychiatry organizes a list of mental disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Anankelogy answers with this introductory list of defunctions, to identify common problems easily and systemically overlooked in that book’s medical model diagnostic approach. This short list complements this understanding of internal factors, including ego defenses and cognitive distortions, by articulating external factors.
Psychiatry finds it useful to categorize mental disorders as either egodystonic or egosyntonic. The former identifies maladies like severe anxiety and major depression that the sufferer ascribes as a problem originating from within. The latter identifies maladies like personality disorders that the sufferer ascribes as a problem originating from others. All the items in this list of defunctions tend to be egosyntonic: the suffering generally gets blamed on others. But that is a diagnostic tool not rigidly applied here.
Instead of diagnosing, anankelogy assesses the impact on each other’s needs from these various defunctions. Instead of relying on health experts to diagnose some inner problem, anankelogy encourages everyone to use relational knowing (as a testable hypotheses) to recognize the many associations outside of themselves affecting how well they function.
When testing the accuracy of the relational knowing statement, reason alone provides a first indication. The higher your functioning level, the more generally reliable the observed association. Such reasoning is kept accountable to available data that can statistically test the correlation.
Better relating
The greater the correlation between both sides in a relational knowing statement, the better. If all available data shows the link between the two is actually statistically weak, then the asserted correlation may not apply. At least not in your situation. It may elsewhere.
When it comes to traumatizing associations, no statistically significant correlation is necessary. The fact a horrific event could possibly occur only once more—to again threaten your wellbeing or even your survival—is significant enough of a correlation.
Accountability points to the plumb line of peakfunctionality. Not to the lower impersonal standards of empirical rigor or judicial processes. But to the higher standard of living fully functioning lives individually and together. The point here is not simply to know better, but for all of us to do better through more honest relating. This list provides a tool for such better relating.
Format
Each entry follows an easy to follow format, starting with its number and title.
-
Then a definition follows to state what the defunction is.
-
The need experience of the defunction provides more detail.
-
Defunctionalizing frames the defunction in relational knowing statements, which can be converted to testable hypotheses.
-
Refunctionalizing reframes the same relational knowing statements with the relation reversed, to raise the level of functioning, which can also be converted to testable hypotheses.
Defunction pattern
This defunction list follows a pattern in drifting off course from resolving needs.
Avoidance defunctions
As life grows more complex with larger populations, resolving every specific need grows increasingly challenging. A pattern of avoidance creeps in. The first thing to avoid is the increasing load of pain from unresolved needs. The next to avoid is consequences of diminished functioning.
Popgen defunctions
Religion and philosophy play a large role in this adjustment pattern. They can offer meaning for suffering with a vision for overcoming it, but can also be cheapened when generalized for popular consumption that merely copes with painfully diminished functioning. A schism develops between thoroughly examined answers and their watered-down versions that tend to perpetuate this slide into lowered functioning.
Conflict defunctions
Failed avoidance options tend to give way to adversarial options. Flight shifts to fight. At this stage, fighting tends to overgeneralize the conflict. Instead of fighting to resolve needs, the emphasis in these defunctions is to fight for relief from the pain of unmet needs. The struggle actually perpetuates itself, and can become comfortably familiar.
Impact defunctions
Once attacked by others who overgeneralize you as their foe, you likely fall in line with adversarial norms. Your defensiveness is provoked. You guard yourself from further attacks. You counterattack. You perpetuate the slide into lower functioning even further.
Political defunctions
You join a tribe of folks sharing a common need-experience. You mark out your boundaries to declare your differences from the dreaded others. You contest how public resources should be managed. Your mutual defensiveness typically prioritizes relief over resolving anyone’s needs.
Systemic defunctions
Those in society who rise to the influential top tend to take advantage of this lowered functioning. They offer answers geared more toward pain relief than resolving specific needs. Most of these cultural or institutional leaders lack vision to spread peakfunctionality to all. Their own lack of resolved needs plants the seeds of their imminent decline. Attempts to crush the challenges of anankelogizers (who fully resolve needs) tends to make them stronger. Refunctions often flourish in the fertile soil of dead systemic failures.
The list groups these defunctions according to this pattern of six general types. Click on the item in the list below to quickly go to that entry.
Pronunciation guide
anankelogy [n.] (ä'-nä-kĕ'-lŏ-jē): the study of need, specifically here the human experience of need.
anankelogical [adj.] (ä'-nä-kĕ-lŏ'-jĭ'-kâl): of, relating to, or characteristic of anankelogy; referring to the role of need in another subject.
anankelogist [n.] (ä'-nä-kĕ'-lŏ-jĭst): one who studies the role of need in observable phenomenon.
anankelogically [adv.] (ä'-nä-kĕ-lŏ'-jĭ-kâ-lē'): referring to the role of need on some action. E.g., Political views tend to be less rationally deduced and more anankelogically produced.
anakelogic [adj.] (ä'-nä-kĕ-lŏ'-jĭk): same as anankelogical.
AVOIDANCE items – POPGEN items – CONFLICT items –
IMPACT items – POLITICAL items – SYSTEMIC items
30. Conflict porn
33. Self-serving dismissiveness
34. Self-righteous defensiveness
36. Relief bias
37. Familiarity bias
38. Imposed relief
39. Impact avoidance
40. Impact neglect
46. Rationalized systemic failure
47. Mass institution mission creep
49. Enabled evil
Why “defunction”
Nature-based anankelogy recognizes your ability to function depends on both internal biological-psychological factors and external sociological-environmental factors. Wellness is psychosocial, not merely psychological.
This list emphasizes the psychosocial impacts on wellness often overlooked by Western emphasis on the exclusively psychological. These integrate what Durkheim called social facts, that transcend individuals and yet largely determine outcomes. The Western mind with its bias toward individuality easily overlooks external checks on full human agency.
The negative impact tends to become most visible in the individual as they lose their ability to fully function. Their behavior slips into self-indulgence. They are seen as less prosocial. They break laws. They become targets for law enforcement. They are shamed. They shame themselves. Western culture affords less critique to the external contexts contributing to individual lost functioning—until now.
The psychological literature is rich with explanations for pathology, or what anankelogy refers to as low functioning. This list seeks to:
1) complement what is already known from psychology by filling in the gaps with overlooked psychosocial factors of wellness, and
2) start at the threshold of a continuum of diminishing functionality, instead of relying on an arbitrary wellness-pathology binary.
Need-response resource
Often, these elements start out quite subtle. Then build up with creeping normalcy. By giving such elements a name, perhaps we can improve our response to such needs. And sustain wellness before it mushrooms into full blown pathology.
Typically before someone gets visibly sick, or loses full functioning, their needs fail to fully resolve. Some core need fails to return to full equilibrium. They lacked the proper resource to restore full balance. Their access to proper resources was lacking. They could not securely access resources out of their personal control. This list integrates the need-experience funnel to help understand a loss of personal, interpersonal and group functioning.
Although recognized as more value-neutral and less stigmatizing than disease, disorder also applies primarily—if not exclusively—to internal loss of functioning. It conveniently overlooks the equally impactful external factors. This list recognizes how function exists within the individual and between the individual and others, and even within and between groups—without emphasizing any to the neglect of the other.
This list—which is not exhaustive by any means—identifies common limits to full psychosocial functioning. Instead of disorder, nature-based anankelogy identifies these as defunctions. To be sure, order is largely arbitrary to one’s culture. Function is more independent of culture. This list raises the bar, from how an individual functions to fit the given order, to include all impacts on functioning that results in the expected order.
In short, this defunction list provides applied anankelogy need-response with a disciplined means to resolve underserved needs in us all. Expect the list to grow. Perhaps you can add to it. See if it can speak to your experience, and help you address a problem or two.
1. Vulnerability avoidance
Vulnerability avoidance is the persistent evasion of dropping your guard with others close to you, typically out of fear or rejection and often a consequence of normative alienation, nomoscentricity, pistiscentricity and other defunctions.
Need experience
The more authentic you can be with others, the easier to face your own shortcomings. They can give you honest, helpful feedback for improving yourself and your relationships. You are likely more courageously vulnerable toward those who personally know you the best. While you are likely cautiously vulnerable, if at all, towards those who know you least.
Avoidance has its place. If facing a threat risks unbearable trauma, temporary avoidance may be prudent. Assertive avoidance is better than passive, habitual avoidance. Acknowledge the threat while you avoid becoming overwhelmed. Slipping into a habit of avoiding the uncomfortable dimensions of reality tends to attract more pain to avoid. Keep any avoidance strategic and relatively brief. As soon as possible, find someone with whom you can drop your guard.
The more vulnerable you are towards others who you can entrust with your full authenticity, the more you can drop your guard and let others see more of your total being—both your strengths and weaknesses. Honored vulnerability correlates with more needs fully resolving, while remaining guarded to everyone (including toward yourself) correlates with fewer needs resolving, more pain, and less ability to fully function in life.
Defunctionalizing
The less you can expose your deepest secrets with another who responds positively to your emotional intimacy, the more guarded you will feel when vulnerable towards others. The less you can feel safely vulnerable to anyone, and the more guarded as a consequence, the fewer of your needs can fully resolve. The more pain you endure. The less you can then function.
Refunctionalizing
The more you can expose your deepest secrets with another who responds positively to your emotional intimacy, the safer you will feel when vulnerable towards others. The more you can feel safely vulnerable to anyone, and the less guarded as a consequence, the more of your needs can fully resolve. The less pain you endure. The more you can then function.
2. Mass avoidance
Mass avoidance is the widespread norm to not personally engage with others or in something that seems uncomfortable or threatening. E.g., widespread evasion of our natural tendency to first estimate the trustworthiness of others by their most visible features, lest we get publicly labeled as a bigot. See normative alienation.
Need experience
Where vulnerability avoidance occurs on a personal level, mass avoidance occurs on a collective level. If few of us can feel safely vulnerable to be totally honest with others, or with ourselves, more of us will assume avoidance is common. Other reasons emerge to avoid the avoidable.
We learn to avoid direct confrontation with others when sensing the results could be worse than putting up with the status quo. Unless supported by similarly situated others, we are prone to vulnerably tolerate increases in anxiety and depression than to challenge the institutional culprits contributing to such pain.
As Jefferson affirmed in the U.S. Declaration of Independence: “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.” This applies not only to government, but to any large-scale mass institution tasked to serve public needs.
In mass societies like ours, mass institutions emerged to address large-scale needs. We learn to trust others demonstrably more qualified than ourselves to address many of our common needs.
-
We entrust our interpersonal safety needs to law enforcement.
-
We entrust our emergency needs to first responders.
-
We entrust our national security needs to the military.
-
We entrust our private goods and service needs to the economy.
-
We entrust our public policy needs to politics.
-
We entrust our justice needs to the judiciary.
-
We entrust our health needs to healthcare.
-
We entrust our aging needs to senior caregiving like nursing homes.
-
We entrust our credential learning needs to education.
-
We entrust our knowledge access needs to libraries including online search engines.
-
We entrust our entertainment needs to mass media.
-
We entrust our informed-of-events needs to journalism.
-
We entrust our social expression needs to online social media.
-
We entrust our direct communication needs to communication technologies.
-
We entrust our movement needs to transportation technologies like cars and planes.
-
We entrust our travel needs to public roadways.
-
We entrust our energy needs to power infrastructure.
Indigenous members of tribal societies generally amassed some skills to address all their needs on their own. They had to. Significant portions of their lives demanded forays of hunting alone or in small groups. Larger societies spread out responsibilities. You become vulnerable to others with the skills to more effectively address your needs. You learn to avoid risking your needs to others.
You as an individual know you lack the resources to confront better-resourced institutions. The more you depend on the good of such institutions, the easier to stomach its bad. Until your stomach keeps score. Then perhaps your flight-shifts-to-flight. Your fear gives way to anger. Your habit of avoidance snaps to become adversarial.
-
Avoidance options served your fear = you cannot handle what you see is your responsibility to handle alone.
-
Adversarial options served your anger = you cannot accept what you see as another acting irresponsibly to you.
The more support you find, your avoidance mode will likely collapse into adversarial options. But if left in isolation and kept over-responsible, you likely remain stuck in mass avoidance with others similarly situated. You may not even notice it.
The more we massively avoid something unpleasant, like being labeled racist, the more widely reinforced the avoidance of something widely uncomfortable, such as the natural tendency to initially judge others by visible features. We can end up getting more of what we expect to avoid.
Racism, for example, will inevitably persist while overgeneralizing as bad, or as good, any pigment-based bias that would otherwise naturally dissipate if freer to acknowledge this ubiquitous tendency to first screen by instantly visible cues. We cannot solve our specific problems from the level of generalizing that created them. Mass avoidance serves as a kind of reinforced generalizing.
Mass avoidance of what is agreeably uncomfortable often crystallizes into a shared norm. We admit our fears to no one. We keep our guard up all the time. We often provoke each other’s defensiveness, blaming each other. Fewer of our needs ever fully resolve. We suffer more and more. We function less and less.
Defunctionalizing
The fewer others are dropping their guard to expose their full authenticity, the less likely you will risk dropping your guard to expose your authentic self to raw rejection. The more others avoid, the more you avoid. The more we all avoid, and socially punish those who expose their authentic full being, the more normatively we all avoid matters we would otherwise face more courageously.
Refunctionalizing
The more of us find the support to risk dropping our guard, and can present the consequences as a positive experience, the more others may be inspired to drop more of their guard. You likely will test the waters with those closest to you, or those you find most trustworthy with your authentic acknowledgement of your full being. The less you hide, the less others can rationalize hiding their questionable stuff. The more we socially reward exposing our true selves, weaknesses and all, the more infectious our love for one another. The more courageous we all could be toward each other.
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
The fewer of your needs actually resolve, the more your body naturally warns you how you are unable to function fully. The longer it takes to address your increasingly load of unresolved needs, the more of your attention is pulled to ease these needs. The more your attention is pulled to ease these needs, the less focus you can give elsewhere. The less these needs can resolve, the more at risk of sliding into dysfunction and into misfunction.
text
Refunctionalizing
The more of your needs actually resolve, the less your body must warn you of a declining ability to fully function. The quicker you can address unresolved needs, the easier to give your attention elsewhere. The more readily your needs can promptly resolve, the more enabled you can sustain or move up into peakfunction.
4. Discomfort avoidance
Discomfort avoidance is the evasion of any kind of pain, failing to differentiate between positive organic pain and less positive residual pain, biostructural pain and metapain. See pain moralization.
Need experience
Discomfort, as a mild form of pain, exists to warn you of a possible threat to be removed. Removing the threat, or realizing the perceived threat does not actually exist, sufficiently removes the pain. But when seeking to remove the pain itself, instead of the source of the pain, the trouble persists to report more pain. Pain is not the problem as much as the trouble pain reports. Shooting the messenger lets that painful trouble painfully persist.
Discomfort naturally starts as organic pain, to warn you of something to remove. If the actual threat is not promptly removed, or if not promptly removing yourself from the threat, residual pain sets in to repeat the warning. If still not removing the threat, biostructural pain sets in as the repeating warning burns a damaging neuropathway. Eventually, metapain sets in to warn of the threat of your body’s own persisting and quite damaging pain. Actually, metapain can accompany any of the other types.
Unless you are routinely processing your pain by promptly resolving needs, you are easily at risk of conflating your healthy organic pain with less healthy later forms of pain. You may slip into the habit of evading all forms of pain, which naturally builds up as the perceived and often real threats persist to provoke more pain.
Modern conveniences make it easy to avoid processing any pain. Intoxicating substances enable discomfort avoidance. Popular politics, ubiquitous technologies, easily available mood-altering substances, and other factors work together to turn this discomfort avoidance into norms of mass avoidance.
Instead of willingly struggle in pain for another, we are all more likely to expect others to endure hardships for us. With symfunctional strain consuming our cognitive bandwidth (cognition contraction), we may hardly question the norms of our frequent avoidance of discomfort.
Pain is not the problem as much as the trouble pain reports.
Defunctionalizing
The less support you receive while struggling with something you find increasingly unbearable, the less apt you are to accommodate other uncomfortable items. The less your pain processes toward resolving its needs, the more guarded you’re likely to be against anything uncomfortable.
The more life presents you alternatives to enduring life’s natural discomforts, the more likely you avoid discomforts of almost any kind. The less you face life’s natural discomforts (or overloaded by unnatural discomforts), the more agonizing you likely find what otherwise would be tolerable.
The more you avoid discomfort, the more apt you are to project your unwelcomed pain onto others. The slower you process pain to resolve needs, the more likely intense pains leave a deep imprint of trauma on you. The more trauma you carry, the more difficult to process your life’s pain toward resolving needs. The more your cognition capacity severely contracts from such trauma, the more predisposed to settle for relief-believing and relief-generalizing. And the more apt you are to moralize all pain as bad. And the more drawn you are to popgen views.
The more discomfort you avoid, the more discomfort you tend to endure.
Refunctionalizing
The more support you receive while struggling with something you find increasingly unbearable, the more apt you are to deal with other uncomfortable items. The more your pain processes toward resolving its needs, the less guarded you’re likely to be against anything uncomfortable.
The more life presents you alternatives to enduring life’s natural discomforts, the less likely you choose to avoid discomforts. The more you face life’s natural discomforts (and not overloaded by unnatural discomforts), the less agonizing and more tolerable you find life’s many discomforts.
The less you avoid discomfort, the less apt you are to project your pain onto others. The quicker you process pain to resolve needs, the less likely intense pains leaves a deep imprint of trauma, and can actually result in posttraumatic growth. The less trauma you carry, the easier to process your life’s pain toward resolving needs. The less your cognition capacity contracts from trauma, the less predisposed to settle for relief-believing and relief-generalizing. And the less at risk you are to moralize all pain as bad. And the less drawn you are to popgen views.
The more discomfort you embrace, the less discomfort you tend to endure.
5. Pain moralization
Pain moralization is generalizing all aesthetically unpleasant experience as morally bad. In other words, it is believing all pain is bad. See discomfort avoidance.
Need experience
There is no such thing as pain apart from unresolved needs. Behind each unpleasant emotion is an unresolved need. Shooting the messenger of painful emotion misses its warning. More pain usually follows.
Fear warns you of something you cannot confidently handle. You still need to handle it, even if you moralize the fear itself as bad. Too often, the fear of pain is worse than the pain itself, and worse than the originating threat.
Anger warns you of something you cannot readily accept. You still need to face it, even if you moralize the anger itself as bad. Rejecting your anger can never substitute for the actual threat unacceptable to your life.
Depression compels you to redirect your energies elsewhere. You will be forced by nature to shift your focus, even if you moralize such depression as morally bad. While intensely unpleasant, depression serves a need. If left unheeded, the depression persists. If suppressed with medication, it naturally reemerges to keep warning you of the threat to be removed.
Sure, sometimes the pain is too much to bear. Sometimes it is necessary to provisionally lower the intensity of too much pain. Sometimes countering it with some indulgent pleasures, to distract you from all the pain, is not the worst thing you can do. But you best keep your eyes on the prize: facing and removing the threat at the source of your pain.
Once you recognize the threat and start removing it, its organic pain often subsides. But if recognized late, after layers of residual pain has set in, you may need some way to remove the threat of excess pain to more easily and more fully focus on the originate threat to be removed. The pain itself is not moralized as bad. You merely recognize there is too much pain to serve its purpose.
Meaningful moralizing seeks to fully resolve needs. Appreciating pain’s natural role in resolving needs helps to build a highly functioning morality.
There is no such thing as pain apart from unresolved needs.
Defunctionalizing
The more you avoid natural discomforts of life, the more you miss life’s natural messenger of threats to remove. The more you miss your emotion’s message to remove threats, the more those threats persist to evoke more painful emotions. The more pain you feel overwhelming you, including more trauma, the more apt to generalize all pain as bad.
Refunctionalizing
The more you embrace life’s messenger of pain, the more you know what threats to promptly remove. The more threats promptly removed, the better you can function. The better you can function, the less prone to moralize all pain as bad.
6. Relief-belief
Relief-belief is latching onto what you think is true or not primarily to relieve yourself from discomfort.
Need experience
Ideally, we believe only what is actually true. In reality, we all believe things not fully aligned with reality. We believe what we need to believe, even if what we need in the moment is some relief from life’s painful reality.
As symfunctionality strain sets in from a growing list of unresolved needs, it shrinks one’s ability to think through all you face in life. Each unresolved need competes for your attention, robbing you of full focus of whatever stands before you now.
It’s painful. It also can feel like you are being too stupid to process your thoughts, as you know you should. Or perhaps have processed them before. You dare not let others see you stumble in your cognitive abilities, lest you get labeled as dumb.
You cling to ideas that offer relief, or hope of relief. You fill gaps in your knowledge with what provisionally provides you relief. If kept provisional, okay. You can update to more accurate information later.
Too often, temporary understanding solidifies into long held beliefs to relieve you of not knowing the full story.
Such relief tends to be short-lived. Your beliefs can only offer short-term relief. Resolving needs is what removes the pain.
Defunctionalizing
The more you struggle in pain from a threat that persists, the more drawn you are to beliefs that offer you a sense of relief. The more you cling to these beliefs for relief, the less you engage in the actual threats to be removed for full functioning. The more you believe for relief, the more in pain you typically remain, keeping you attached to these comforting beliefs.
Refunctionalizing
The less you struggle in pain from a threat that no longer persists, the less drawn you are to beliefs that offer you a sense of relief. The less you cling to these beliefs for relief, the more you can engage the actual threats and remove it for full functioning. The less you believe for relief, the less in pain you are kept, allowing you to detach from comforting beliefs.
7. Relief-generalizing
Relief-generalizing is oversimplifying a reaction to some need to gain broad support for relieving its pain. “Relief-gen” for short. See relief-belief.
Need experience
Generalizing includes two yet complementary ideas. On the one hand, keeping a matter simple enough by avoiding too many disagreeable specifics. On the other hand., applying the approach to as many that find it agreeable.
In our democratic world of consumer driven choices, instant relief from pain tends to win over disciplined endurance necessary to resolve a need to remove its pain. In our lives of shared struggles, symfunctional strain prompts most of us to go along with broader approaches we can all agree upon. We dare not bring up specifics that could undercut unity.
For example, we debate if police brutality has its roots in a few racist cops or has roots in a racist system that compels cops to objectify mostly nonwhite citizens as a likely threat to law and order. This binary expects we can find answers without disconfirming specifics of actual lived experiences of police officers and lived experiences of those they frequently target. To avoid the discomfort of embarrassing specifics, we slip in a dysfunction of pain avoidance.
Relief-gen serves as the dysfunctional third step in the institution function array, after the symfunctional second step of binarism.
-
judicial relief-gen: prioritizing relief from pain of suffered violence without attending to any of the underlying needs, effectively perpetuating the trauma of that violence.
-
political relief-gen: prioritizing relief from pain of publicly affected needs without attending to underlying needs, effectively perpetuating the pain of psychosocial imbalance.
-
economic relief-gen: prioritizing relief from pain of economic insecurity without attending to any of the underlying needs, effectively perpetuating the shock of economic insecurity.
-
medical relief-gen: prioritizing relief from pain of health conditions without attending to any of the underlying needs, effectively reinforcing a lack of wellness or lack of healing.
-
educational relief-gen: prioritizing relief from pain from lack of access to educational opportunities without attending to any of the underlying needs, effectively locking out access.
We find ourselves too consumed by pain to realize apparent contradictory opposites are actually complementary to the essential whole. Embracing this whole is necessary to resolve the needs producing the pain. But at this point, we vehemently resist what is good to cling to the familiar yet consoling bad.
We generalize for relief with a sledgehammer approach what actually requires a scalpel of nuanced respect of all relevant facts on all sides. Consequently, we shape policies that rarely address the unresolved needs at the root of our politicized problems. We support institutions that incidentally perpetuate our pain and problems in the name of serving our needs, and then cling to them for relief from the predictable slide further into defunction.
Defunctionalizing
The more you generalize for comforting relief from pain, the fewer specifics you address. The fewer specifics you address, the less likely you will get to the specific threats to be removed. The more you miss specific threats, the more pain you will likely remain in the long haul.
Refunctionalizing
The less you generalize for comforting relief from pain, the more specifics you address. The more specifics you address, the more likely you will get to the specific threats to be removed. The more you removed specific threats, the less cause for in the long haul.
8. Cognition contraction
Cognition contraction is the natural consequence of pressing needs consuming one’s focus or cognitive load, shrinking one’s cognitive bandwidth.
Need experience
Your working memory posts a traffic limit. Scientists can tell you that your body sends around 11 million bits of information per second for your mind to process. But your mind can process only a few bits of information at one time. If pressed with an urgent need, your body’s self-continuance mechanisms could limit this number further.
Each need you experience prioritizes your mind’s focus. The more intense the need (i.e., vital for your immediate survival as opposed to something that can wait till much later), the more of your mind’s processing space is consumed.
Consider the college student working at a fast food restaurant under intense pressures. They can hardy keep up during a dinner rush. When making a mistake with a customer’s order, the customer assumes the mistake proves the worker is not smart enough to work elsewhere. The worker knows it’s statistically possible because, unlike the prejudicial customer, they took a course in statistics.
Your temporary working memory can process only around seven bits of information at one time. If faced with an increasing load of unresolved needs, your immediate focus cannot track it all. Nor can your attention remain free from recurring emotional reminders of your unresolved needs.
As your mind pulls your cognitive abilities away from other matters to attend to needs, your ability to cognitively process other matters gets compromised. You easily stumble in ways that can leave you appearing, and feeling, rather stupid. What seems as a lack of intellect is actually a taxation on your full capacity to think matters through.
As your cognition contracts with mounting symfunctional strain, you become prone to other defunctions listed here, like vulnerability avoidance, relief-generalizing, pistiscentricity, popgen, binarism, reactive vacillation and others.
Defunctionalizing
The more your attention must attend to immediate threats, the less you can focus elsewhere. The less you afford to focus on other matters, the more likely others presume you lack intellect or reasoning skills.
Refunctionalizing
The less your attention must attend to immediate threats, the more you can focus elsewhere. The more you afford to focus on other matters, the less likely others presume you lack intellect or reasoning skills.
9. Reified self-brokenness
Reified self-brokenness is when you generalize you are an innately flawed individual, rather than presenting as broken due to sociocultural conditions. See psychosocial reduction.
Need experience
Countless human generations made it this far by adequately resolving their self-needs and social-needs, sufficiently on par with each other. With the emergence of mass societies, the natural balancing act between self-needs and social-needs at a more local level became increasingly replaced with large scale psychosocial vacillation.
If you see yourself in an exceptional society, providing you with freedom and justice and peace, you naturally conclude shortcomings point to the individual. In a popular (popgen) version of personal religious faith, you generalize the teaching of original sin as explaining your utter failure to be your best in this exceptional land of opportunity.
This assumption of innate brokenness was replicated in the Enlightenment Era. The typical person is assumed to lack sufficient reasoning skills and therefore must rely on academic expertise to make smarter decisions. The lay person is viewed as duped by implicit theories, in contrast to the explicit theories of learned expertise.
Health professionals and even mainstream educators continue this historical paternalistic tradition. Socio-cultural conditions undermining good eating and exercising get systemically overlooked. The layperson is easily viewed as too limited to make better health choices. If economic norms depend on this assumption, it can be next to impossible to recognize disconfirming evidence to the contrary.
Defunctionalizing
The less you can freely function as an individual, while assuming no external limits present you from freely functioning, the more drawn you are to believing you as an individual must be innately flawed.
The less you recognize external limits to your functioning, the more you likely see yourself as literally broken from birth. The more your relief-believing in your sense of individual helplessness finds support in the sanctioned beliefs of others, the more attracted you are to reifying your sense of individual brokenness.
Refunctionalizing
The less you can freely function as an individual, but recognized external limits not allowing you to freely function, the less drawn you are to believing you as an individual must be innately flawed.
The more you recognize external limits to your functioning, the less you reify self-limits. The less your relief-believing in your sense of individual helplessness finds support in the sanctioned beliefs of others, the less attracted you are to reifying your sense of individual brokenness.
10. Normative alienation
Normative alienation is the socially sanctioned expectation not to personally engage with one another, and rely instead on impersonal rules to guide behavior toward each other. See nomoscentricity.
Need experience
You cannot personally know the needs of everyone with whom you interact in modern society. So you fall back on established norms—both written and unwritten—to guide your actions toward others, as they do toward you. Not all of your needs can resolve if left to the minimal guidance of rules. At best, laws address your more basic needs. You need personal ties to address all of your affected needs.
As societies grow larger into mass societies, labor increasingly divides into increasingly specialized roles. Mass institutions evolved to serve a specific class of overarching needs. The need for protection from lawbreakers, for example, gave rise to law enforcers. As society expanded further, law enforcement subdivided into further specialties. One unit specialized in gathering evidence at crime scenes, while others focused in mitigating domestic disputes.
Mass institutions evolved to address large-scale needs like educational needs, health needs, legal needs, economic needs, and so forth. As these mass institutions replaced small scale interactions for respecting each other’s needs, we increasingly trust written and unwritten rules to address one another’s needs.
We grow accustomed to mass institutions accumulating resources to serve its commissioned large-scale needs. A splitting emerges between mission needs (like protecting citizens from violence) and institution needs (like the exclusive right to use lethal force). Individual institutions compete with other institutions for resources. Their focus on self-continuance tends to distract focus from their originating mission needs. Mass mission creep seeps in. They risk serving themselves at the expense of serving the population for which they institutionally exist.
As the population becomes vulnerably dependent on these mass institutions to serve these large-scale needs, the split typically expands further between “experts” and “laypersons.” Those most vulnerable to these mission needs, or large-scale needs, may resist most vociferously to any change. Their bias prompts them to become apologists for institutions failing to serve mission needs. They cannot risk further slide from symfunctional strain into painful dysfunction or worse. They must defer to these trusted experts to maintain the familiarity of normalized estrangement.
We remain personally alienated from each other as we expect impersonal norms to minimally guide our actions. Then it becomes awkward to ask about each other’s specific needs affected by a situation. So we typically sit back and relate to each other from convenient but likely opposing categories. While stuck in this sanctioned estrangement, fewer needs can resolve.
Defunctionalizing
The less you personally engage with others, the more disposed you are to rely on rules to serve your needs. The more alienated you remain from others, the more dependent you become on impersonal laws. Fewer of your needs can fully resolve. You then easily slide into symfunctionality or worse. You will cite laws for how others should respect your needs, with less regard for how you are to respect the needs you affect in others. You slide into increasing levels of pain.
Refunctionalizing
Laws best serve as a starting point for guarding your basic needs. By checking other’s behaviors impacting you, laws afford you necessary space to cultivate meaningful relationships. These relationships can enable you to fully resolve needs in ways no law ever can.
11. Pisticentricity
Pisticentricity is centering your decisions around what you think is true or not, as opposed to continually interacting with others for feedback to your impactful decisions and actions. Pisti is the classical Greek word for belief. It also covers faith and trust, which arguably are distinct from each other. See relief-generalizing, relief-belief, and vulnerability avoidance. May involve cognition contraction.
Need experience
I don’t know what I don’t know. You don’t know what you don’t know. How will we know unless we remain open to what others have to say to us? If you have no one in your life to process your deepest beliefs or painful experiences, you are left to your own devices to figure out what is or isn’t true.
You know best through others who know you inside and out. Apart from others’ gracious corrections and sharing targeted information, you easily get clogged by blind spots, unchecked assumptions, and biases that cut you off from a vibrant view of reality.
The New Testament emphasis on trust shifts from relying on an all-powerful Creator to relying on your own wits to figure out what is true or not. “I believe” this or that replaces “I trust” someone to help check my biased thinking.
The more you slide into symfunctional strain, especially if slipping into dysfunction or misfunction, the more certain you will feel you must be. As your cognition contracts, you cannot afford too many ambiguities. You cling harder to your beliefs. You engage others less and less, just the opposite of what you need right now.
Absent of others engaging your experiences and beliefs, you are more easily drawn to reified self-brokenness, vulnerability avoidance, pain moralization, relief-belief and other defunctions. Your symfunctional strain prompts you to care more about your own needs than the needs of others.
You could break free from the clutches of this pisticentricity by reaching out to engage others. The more you vulnerably share your experiences and beliefs with trustworthy others, the less your life centers around what you recently felt must be so.
Defunctionalizing
The less you can process your feelings with others, the more you must cling to your beliefs for relief, including political generalizations.
For example, the less you can freely admit your fears about another cultural group, with someone who can help you process your concerns in meaningful detail, the less you can let go of your previous generalizations about that group.
Refunctionalizing
The more you can share your emotionally sensitive needs with a trustworthy other, the less reliant you will be on political generalizations.
For example, the more you can freely admit your fears about another cultural group, with someone who can help you process your concerns in meaningful detail, the more you can let go of your previous generalizations about that group.
12. Nomoscentricity
Nomoscentricity is centering your decisions and actions around impersonal norms, instead of personally knowing what others may specifically need from you. Nomos is the classical Greek word for law. See normative alienation and vulnerability avoidance.
Need experience
We are geared to personally know about a hundred people or so. We know a handful of these the deepest. Outside this circle of close friends we count on a couple dozen or so causal friends. Outside our casual friends is a list of names in our social network. The further from the center of our social world, the more we rely on impersonal norms to determine our behavior toward one another.
The less we personally know each other and specific needs, the more we rely on impersonal laws to guide interpersonal interactions. This gives rise to the field of law, and the profession of lawyers, along with the mass institution of the judiciary. Those with greater means to apply laws to their advantage enjoy what we can call “legal leverage”. The less advantaged tend to acquiesce to terms less favorable to their specific needs under the pressure of privileged force sanctioned by leveraged law.
Laws rarely address specific needs. Norms are generally kept vague, to keep them applicable to as many as possible. Too many laws create too many accidental lawbreakers. Excess reliance on laws risk incentivizing irresponsibility. They can ensure your property is safe, and informal norms can protect you from racial epithets. But these norms cannot fully resolve your need for belonging, or for autonomy. Your needs fully resolve through your deeper social connections.
Laws usefully report boundaries to inform us what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior, when we cannot track all the needs we could impact. But only to an extent. Laws try to match the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force to curb illegitimate use of force. But laws generalize. Laws can never fully address all your specific needs. Many forms of harm remain legal.
If honest, you can admit “crime” is mere convention. You don’t object to violation of law as much as you object to some negative impact on your needs, such as your need for safety. You trust the conventions of law to impersonally convey these needs. But if you only rely on the conventions of law, you set yourself up for repeated disappointment. Depending on legal conventions to relieve you of painful needs predisposes you to suffer more pain, to yearn for more relieving laws.
The needs themselves are not conventional. They exist without being written down anywhere. When we permit the criminal code or any law to stand in for specific needs that the law cannot effectively convey, overdependence on law risks permitting your overlooked needs to remain painfully unresolved. Your most painful needs could then pull you into prohibited acts of desperation. Too much law risks lawlessness.
While no one sits above the law, no law sits above the needs it exists to serve. Whose needs are best served by any law, or how it gets enforced? The point is not to obey any law to merely appease authority and expect all needs will then resolve. Laws themselves do not resolve needs. Caring people do, whether guided by laws or not.
Let every law remind us we can do more than its minimal requirement to resolve the needs it identifies, and the relevant needs it does not identify. Let laws serve as a stepping stone for communicating each other’s more specific impacted needs.
If you only have laws to set your standards, your own specific needs are likely overlooked. It’s hard to always obey laws that seem to leave you in the cold. A surprising number of Americans do not have someone they can call upon during an emotional crisis. They bear their stress alone. This breakdown of local community cohesion raises the role of impersonal norms. Instead of personally engaging each other, we rely more on impersonal rules to sort out our lives. And never more satisfied for the effort.
You could break free from the clutches of this nomoscentricity by asking those closest to you what they need from you. And tell them what you personally need of them. Not this will turn the tables right away. But you may find it an uplifting experience, to let go of impersonal rules by replacing them with interpersonal connections at the most localized and intimate areas in your life.
While no one sits above the law, no law sits above the need it exists to serve.
Defunctionalizing
The less you personally know the needs of those around you, the more you rely on impersonal norms (written and unwritten) to guide your behavior to respect each other’s needs. The fewer people you personally know and who know you, the more central the role of impersonal norms to your life.
The more central norms play in your life, the fewer of your personal needs fully resolve. The fewer of your personal needs fully resolve, the more your consequential pain (i.e., symfunctional strain) pulls you to rely on norms for relief-generalizing.
Refunctionalizing
The more you personally know the needs of those around you, the less you rely on impersonal norms (written and unwritten) to guide your behavior to respect each other’s needs. The more people you personally know and who know you, the less central the role of impersonal norms to your life.
The less central norms play in your life, the more of your personal needs can flexibly resolve. The more of your personal needs fully resolve, the less you suffer any symfunctional strain, and the better you can function.
13. Prenormativity
Prenormativity, or premature normativity, is insisting something should be done to ease some need or ease its pain without sufficient information for a decision to resolve that need.
Need experience
In routine situations, your reactions typically prove sufficient to resolve your needs (unless caught in some unhealthy habits). In novel situations, quick reactions can land you in trouble. Modern life presents many novel situations, and many opportunities to get you into trouble.
What worked for you before may not work again. What worked to ease your pain unlikely removed its pain. What worked to lower your pain is unlikely to resolve your needs.
With fewer resolved needs, symfunctional strain sinks in. To rid yourself of all this unwelcomed pain of unresolved needs, you are apt to skip important information and insist what must be done. Act now for relief, ask questions later.
Your premature conclusions can find plenty of support with relief-generalizing online, and in person. The rush to do something about some painful need typically seeks relief-over-resolve, and often at the expense of others. If unconcerned how your self-relieving actions may negatively impact others, you can easily and quickly rationalize them.
If we are relying on impersonal norms to guide behavior, instead of personally engaging each other, we understandably insist what others should do to respect our needs. Or we could first find out what others need from us, and inform them what we need of them. We could prioritize resolving each other’s affected needs, to improve overall functioning and remove the pain of unmet needs.
Defunctionalizing
The less you personally know the needs of those around you, the more you rely on impersonal norms (written and unwritten) to guide your behavior to respect each other’s needs. The fewer people you personally know and who know you, the more central the role of impersonal norms to your life.
The more central norms play in your life, the fewer of your personal needs fully resolve. The fewer of your personal needs fully resolve, the more your consequential pain (i.e., symfunctional strain) pulls you to rely on norms for relief-generalizing.
Refunctionalizing
The more you personally know the needs of those around you, the less you rely on impersonal norms (written and unwritten) to guide your behavior to respect each other’s needs. The more people you personally know and who know you, the less central the role of impersonal norms to your life.
The less central norms play in your life, the more of your personal needs can flexibly resolve. The more of your personal needs fully resolve, the less you suffer any symfunctional strain, and the better you can function.
14. Nature resistance
Nature resistance is fighting the natural course for resolving needs, whether in yourself or in others.
Need experience
Technological innovation lets us stay ahead of nature’s harsh realities, to address our needs more efficiently and effectively. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate better after discovering sharp-edged flint tools.
With each technological leap in the modern age, the more alienated we become from our roots in nature. Nature was viewed as something external and wild, a threat to be tamed, to be dominated. But indigenous wisdom points out how we are nature, or at least part of nature.
From an indigenous point of view, to go indiscriminately against nature is to go against yourself. And a house divided against itself cannot stand.
You breathe because of nature. It is from nature you eat and drink valuable food and beverages. Nature creates your need for companionship and for moments of solitude, not human ingenuity. We express our natural needs when creating comforts to facilitate our needs.
It is from going against nature’s natural course for resolving needs, to raise functioning and remove pain, that you suffer pain and seek relief. Nature is not your foe, but your unresolved needs. When working with nature to resolve needs, you feel less of a need to control nature’s dominance in your life. You may then respect nature all the more.
Defunctionalizing
The longer it takes for a need to resolve, the more likely you come up with something that can offer immediate relief. The more pain you are in, the less regard you likely have for how your instant reaction could affect others. The more intense the pain, the less open you are apt to be for any information challenging your belief on what to do.
The more you act on the immediate things that come to mind, the less likely you effectively resolve the need. The less resolved, the more pain you suffer. The more pain you feel trapped in, the more you seek immediate actions to escape it. The less effective your reaction, the less you can function.
Refunctionalizing
The quicker it takes for a need to resolve, the less likely you feel a need to come up with something for immediate relief. The less pain you are in, the more regard you likely have for how your response to needs can affect others. The less intense the pain, the more open you likely are to information challenging your beliefs.
The less you act on the immediate things that come to mind, the more likely you effectively resolve the need. The more resolved, the less pain you suffer. The less pain you feel trapped in, the less you feel you must act right away. The more effective your eventual yet relatively prompt response, the better you can function.
15. Avoidant comparison
Avoidant comparison is contrasting one’s own negatively impactful actions with the real or imagined unwelcomed acts of dreaded others. This is often to shift social shame from own behavior to those who can be viewed as less reputable and therefore avoid one’s own possible loss of social status.
Need experience
Your social-need for acceptance, group inclusion, status, and avoidance from the pain of shame can incentivize you to downplay your worst actions. You contrast them with the actions of others and tell yourself yours is not so bad as theirs.
If you can spot undesirable actions or merely dislikeable qualities in others, you can shift attention to these despised others and away from any negative thing you have done. You shift your shame. As a shame-shifter, you avoid taking responsibility for yourself, for your actions, for your errant beliefs.
You rationalize your irresponsibility by claiming you are doing better than others. You then settle for a lower standard. You prioritize relief from your pain over resolving needs that cause pain. You remain stuck at a lower level of functioning.
Defunctionalizing
The more you measure your behavior by the standard of what others are doing, the less you can aspire to resolve your needs. The more you compare yourself to others to avoid the pain of your own imperfections, the less likely you will overcome your imperfections.
Refunctionalizing
The less you measure your behavior by the standard of what others are doing, the more you can aspire to resolve your needs. The less you compare yourself to others and instead face the pain of your own imperfections, the more likely you will overcome your imperfections.
16. Avoidant relativization
Avoidant relativization is turning something with some level of certainty into something fully arbitrary and therefore can evade social pressure to meet any moral standard.
Need experience
Critical thinkers and philosophers continue to challenge overbearing dogma of traditional norms. Laypersons latch onto these questioning of norms. With less discipline, they swing to an extreme of generalizing all disagreeable norms are merely relative.
With rhetorical twists and disingenuous dialogue, they turn something with at least some level of certainty into something fully arbitrary. To avoid being held to account, they overgeneralize how relative these standards are to them.
For example., ideas of mercy and grace can be dismissed as religiously subjective. Or applicable only to those who still follow ancient religious texts. Once relativized, they can excuse their own lack of mercy and grace toward others.
They can blame others for “subjective choices” that actually exist from unchosen needs. They may think all need experiences result from persuasive arguments and rational choices. They may insist all conduct standards are debatable, and deny your needs are objective phenomenon over which you have limited choice. By avoiding standards as merely relative, they can rationalize their own lower functioning.
Defunctionalizing
The more universal principles are relativized as subjective choices, the less helpful they are to resolve affected needs. The less universal principles serve as a guiding standard for interpersonal interactions, the greater the potential for relationships to break down and result in more harm.
Refunctionalizing
The less universal principles are relativized as subjective choices, the more helpful they are to resolve affected needs. The more universal principles serve as a guiding standard for interpersonal interactions, the greater the potential for relationships to help each other improve functioning.
17. Avoidant externalization
Avoidant externalization is evading risk of subjectivity by going to the opposite extreme of objectifying human subject matter. It assumes this improves objectivity but often buries overlooked details in unadmitted biases.
Need experience
The social-need to appear impartial and objective can incentivize one to suppress their biases. They can find arguments that externalize their internal biases, to avoid facing their own vulnerable needs. They can trust standard procedures to ensure the result of a process is seen as impartial.
For example, judicial due process can do more to mask than remove the biases of the adversarial parties. A political debate between candidates betrays their differing priority of vulnerable needs under the guise of rationally explored policies. A failing grade on a research paper can hide the loathing of the instructor’s predisposition against the student’s conclusions.
This speaks to the “popgen” side of reasoning. What often passes as carefully reasoned arguments backed by an established philosophical tradition is often a highly generalized version of it for mass consumption. Reliance on this “rational supremacy” approach avoids the vulnerability necessary to address specific needs. Poor functioning usually results.
Defunctionalizing
The more one guards one’s vulnerabilities behind rational sounding arguments, the less they address their affected needs. The more one externalizes their biases as objective truth, the less likely they are aware of their affected functioning. They don’t realize their blind spots or how it lowers their functioning.
Refunctionalizing
The less one guards one’s vulnerabilities behind rational sounding arguments, the more they address their affected needs. The less one externalizes their biases as objective truth, the more likely they are aware of their affected functioning. They can face their blind spots to improve functioning.
18. Popgen
Popgen is the watered-down version of a critical philosophical tool, to broaden and hopefully popularize its appeal. Or to make if more palpable to those without the time or skills to engage its nuanced specifics. “Popgen” is a portmanteau of “popular” and “generalizing.” See the next few items that applies this defunction.
Need experience
When a new way to understand things grows in popularity, it often undergoes a watering down process. Its specifics often get glossed over. It gets condensed into a generalized version for easier consumption. Its nuance widely missed by the layperson.
The watered down version typically gathers more adherents. They tend to be more intent on relief-generalizing, relief-believing, mass avoidance and discomfort avoidance. They tend to focus less on resolving the needs behind all that pain. This popularized version typically emphasizes its adherents’ own needs. They use it to prioritize relief of their pain. While overlooking the affected needs of others. This typically follows a four-part cycle.
DISTINCTION
A new philosophical tool comes on the stage. It slowly gains support as a refreshing way to address needs left underserved by the status quo. For example, identity politics begins as a useful tool for those with multiple minority statuses. It enables them to address overlooked specific needs with tools like intersectionality, microaggressions, safety from retraumatization, and so forth.
DYNAMIC
As the new philosophy begins to mature with growing support, it reshapes the socio-political landscape. When identity politics emerged as a widely accepted philosophy, it upended political alliances of broad-based liberal coalitions. To address their overlooked social-needs, adherents differentiate themselves from the mainstream liberal camp. The same applies to right-leaning ideologies, like characterizing all left-leaning boycotts as “cancel culture.”
DOGMATIC
Here is where the groundswell of popular support congeals into its popgen version. To integrate into a new whole of widening support, specifics that risk undermining unity are duly avoided. Mass avoidance ensures this popgen version aims more at easing pain than resolving needs producing that avoided pain. Relief-generalizing displaces problem solving. Adherents generalize how others should serve their underserved needs or ease their pain, with little thought of how they impact others. They often loudly proclaim sweeping policies that negatively impact others with a different priority of needs.
DISILLUSION
Those with a different priority of needs tend to object the loudest to this overgeneralized version. These detractors decry how identity politics now “weaponizes” microaggressions into damaging accusations. If the popgen version prioritizes social-needs, then the loudest detractors assert their impacted self-needs. If the popgen version prioritizes self-needs, detractors shout back their affected social-needs. See how this larger cycle of psychosocial vacillation unfolds in the final section.
Defunctionalizing
The more a philosophical tool is generalized to ease needs or to relieve pain, the less it can fully address the specific needs behind that pain. The less a philosophical tool is kept dynamic and humbly provisional (open to input from all affected), the more likely it will perpetuate the original pain. Or slip into reactive vacillation and conflict porn.
Refunctionalizing
The less a philosophical tool is generalized to ease needs or pain, the more it can fully address the specific needs so it can help remove that pain. The more a philosophical tool is kept dynamic and humbly provisional (open to input from all affected), the less likely it will perpetuate the original pain. The more each of us can be safely vulnerable, can promptly process pain, and humbly receive gracious correction, and such, the less prone these originally helpful tools can become weaponized into something harmful—both to others and to undermining own cause.
19. Popgen rationalism
Popgen rationalism is the watered-down version of the Enlightenment ideal of rational thought, stripped much of its original nuance to keep it palpable to the masses.
Need experience
A close cousin to this popgen rationalism is what some academics refer to as lay rationalism. In its popular sense, rationalism is simply using reason over feelings to guide decisions. Anankelogy recognizes how novel situations call for more reflective reasoning than routine situations. Feelings do not automatically result in regretted decisions. You never must reason you way to jerk your burnt hand away from a hot stove. Reasoning fills specific needs.
Rational science emerged by distinguishing itself as more responsive than personal faith to overlooked social-needs. Enlightenment ideals dynamically applied new ways to address social arrangements, now accountable to empirical measures. Then it morphed into something dogmatic.
You are reduced to an objectified reasoning individual actor serving the collective needs of the market. You’re seen as acting in your self-interest at all times in ways that benefits each other in impersonal ways—but in fact favors those in power. The emotional experiences behind your affected needs get viewed as too messy for empirical facts.
As popgen rationalism generalized how to organize society more around reason than religion, its focus on social-needs left widely affected self-needs underserved. This set the stage for emerging philosophies like romanticism to address such overlooked self-needs in a new way.
Defunctionalizing
The more you generalize that you must replace all your intense emotions with impassionate reasoning, the less likely you effectively process your raw pain. The less you process your reasoned-avoided pain, the more social problems (expected to be solved with pure reasoning) tend to persist.
The more you rationalize serving your social-needs with dumbed down enlightenment ideals, the more the impacted yet overlooked self-needs come to the fore. The more underserved this exaggerated form of reasoning underserves widely suffered self-needs, the closer the reign of popgen reasoning comes to an end.
Refunctionalizing
The less you generalize that you must replace your intense emotions with impassionate reasoning, the more likely you effectively process your life’s pain. The more you process your reasoned-avoided pain, the fewer problems can persist.
The less you rationalize serving your social-needs with dumbed down enlightenment ideals, the less you negatively impact overlooked self-needs. The more specifically responsive is your applied reasoning to needs (e.g., in novel situations), the longer the tools of reasoning can survive past the close of the Enlightenment Era.
20. Popgen romanticism
Popgen romanticism is the watered-down version of Romantic Era ideals of individualism and emotional expression, stripped of most of its original nuance to safeguard its mass appeal.
Need experience
As the average person was recognized with individual rights, once suppressed sentiments exploded in expression in the arts and politics. Reasoning was now complemented with honest emotional expressions, and with individual experiences independent from the established order.
Romanticism emerged by distinguishing itself as more responsive to overlooked self-needs with ideals of democratic accountability. Democratic ideals dynamically applied new ways to address personal rights. Then it morphed into something dogmatic. It slipped into reified individualism (as if the individual could exist apart from the unpleasant social contexts of the time).
Old authorities were questioned. Experiments were unleashed in individual expression. Utopian experiments came and went. Ethnocentric nationalism emerged to counter old empires. Social systems were challenged to make room for personal aspirations like never before. Which gave way to new ways or organizing society, such as the Paris Commune in 1871.
The more popgen romanticism generalized how to assert individuality, its focus on self-needs left widely affected social-needs underserved. The proto-socialism of the Paris Commune gave witness to this emerging trend. This set the stage for emerging philosophies like progressivism to address such overlooked social-needs in a new way.
Defunctionalizing
The more you generalize that you have a right to express your personal feelings to anyone and anywhere, the less likely you will honor their personal rights. The less you respect their personal rights, the less likely they will respect yours.
The more you indulge your self-needs with dumbed down romanticism ideals, the more likely you negatively affect the underserved social-needs of others. The more social-needs remain underserved by romanticism ideals, the more its popgen version provokes a counter movement to end romantism’s reign.
Refunctionalizing
The less you generalize that you have a right to express your personal feelings to anyone and anywhere, the more likely you will honor their personal rights. The more you respect their personal rights, the more likely they will respect yours.
The less you indulge your self-needs with dumbed down romanticism ideals, the less likely you negatively affect the underserved social-needs of others. The more specifically responsives is your individuality applied to needs, the longer the ideals of individualism and personal rights can survive past the close of the Romantic Era.
21. Popgen progressivism
Popgen progressivism is the watered-down version of Progressive Era ideals of social improvements and its other social ideals, stripped of its original nuance to keep it widely appealable to as many as possible.
Need experience
This former era of progressivism is distinct from contemporary progressivism. For one, contemporary progressives are universally anti-racist while early American progressives often echoed the racial bias and other ethnocentric sentiments popular in the early 20th Century. Both risks slipping us into a progress trap.
Progressivism emerged by distinguishing itself as more responsive than romanticism to overlooked social-needs. Progressive ideals dynamically applied new ways to address social arrangements, now accountable to social improvements. Then it morphed into something dogmatic.
Progressivism’s social experiment of alcohol Prohibition failed badly, and it leaves its persisting imprint on the “war on drugs.” Such attempts at central social planning aimed largely at disparaged minority populations also led to progressivism’s other egregious project: eugenics. It overgeneralized social improvements in the age of Social Darwinism, and left its lingering legacy in how we avoid admitting the way we other those outside our group identities.
Instead of Republicans and Democrats integrating their understandings, for example, we continue to “progress” by insisting one is better than the other. In the name of progress, or improvement, we fight where the only battle is with our competitive selves. With two steps forward, we slip three steps back.
The more popgen progressivism generalized how to address societal problems, its focus on social-needs left widely affected self-needs underserved. This set the stage for emerging philosophies like existentialism to address such overlooked self-needs in a new way.
Defunctionalizing
The more you generalize how to improved society, the less likely you address all the specifics upon which a healthy society runs. The fewer specifics central planning addresses, the higher the risk such solutions morph into more personal and social problems.
The more you seek to improve society with overgeneralized progressivist ideals, the more likely you negatively affect the underserved self-needs of others. The more these self-needs remain underserved by progressivist ideals, the more its popgen version provokes a counter movement to end progressivism’s reign.
Refunctionalizing
The less you generalize how to improve society, the easier to address all the specifics upon which a healthy society runs. The more specifics central planning addresses, the lower the risk such solutions could morph into more problems.
The more specifically targeted improvement ideas and kept accountable to all impacted, the longer the helpful tools of progressivism (e.g., including all society members in public services) can outlast the end of the Progressive Era.
22. Popgen existentialism
Popgen existentialism is the watered-down version of Existentialism ideal of responsible choice and other existential ideas, stripped much of its original nuance to keep it palpable to the masses.
Need experience
After the devasting meaningless of WWII, meaning was now imbued into our lives—instead of accepted as innate. By asserting our own meaning, we refused to again be completely helpless to external factors like anti-Semitism and colonialism. We could reclaim the dignity of individuality horrifically tarnished in the first half of the 20th Century. We could freely “be” on our terms.
Existentialism emerged by distinguishing itself as more responsive to overlooked self-needs with ideals of personal responsible choice. Existentialist ideals dynamically applied new ways to address the need for personal freedom. Then it morphed into something dogmatic. It slipped into an exaggerated sense of human agency.
“You can be anything you want to be” until you try it. Reality slaps you back. Your blank slate turns out not so blank. And not all purpose extends from human creation. Every living thing experiences the psychosocial purpose of 1) it’s individual self-continuance and 2) its species continuance. When stretched to its generalized extremes, you exist on your own terms at the expense of someone else’s self-determined terms. Alienation exists, even if not exactly existential.
The more popgen existentialism generalized how to address personal problems, its focus on self-needs left widely affected social-needs underserved. This set the stage for emerging philosophies like postmodernism to address such overlooked social-needs in a new way.
Defunctionalizing
The more you generalize that you can freely choose how you experience anything, the more you overlook how life experiences like unprocessed trauma limits actual choices. Not every Holocaust victim had the overman survival resilience of Vicktor Frankl.
The more you reduce life to your personal attitude toward it, watering down existentialism to indulge your self-needs, the more your generalizations about what you can personally accomplish fail to reflect actual lived experiences among us all. No, not every personal economic failure points to personally bad choices.
Refunctionalizing
The less you generalize about how much you can endure completely on your own, the less you overlook how life experiences like unprocessed trauma limits actual choices. This allows you greater empathy for those with the fewest all-around resources.
The less you reduce life to a someone’s personal attitude toward it, by not watering down existentialism to indulge self-needs, the more you can appreciate how attitude serves as a significant aspect but never as a panacea for survival. An inspiring attitude amidst a crisis may attract just the supports needed to get successfully through it.
23. Popgen postmodernism
Popgen postmodernism is the watered-down version of Postmodernism deconstruction and other tools, stripped much of its nuance to apply more easily by the average person.
Need experience
Anything I say is trapped in the language I use to describe it. Anything I write is best seen through the lens of how my own experiences shaped its expression. Anything constructed by language can then be deconstructed, or so goes a central tenet of postmodernism.
Postmodernism emerged by distinguishing itself as more responsive to overlooked social-needs with ideals of deconstructing oppressive social structures. Postmodernism dynamically applied a new way to challenge social structures imposing on minorities. Then it morphed into something dogmatic. It slipped into a self-contradiction of asserting itself over a world that should have no hierarchies.
In its more relief-generalizing version, it easily conflates natural growth hierarchies with arbitrary dominance hierarchies. Indeed, if all hierarchies are bad and nothing can be said is better than the alternatives, then postmodernism cannot be said to be better than modernity. That would be hierarchal.
The more popgen postmodernism generalized how to address societal problems, its focus on social-needs left widely affected self-needs underserved. This sets the stage for new philosophies to emerge to address such overlooked self-needs in a new way. Each psychosocial vacillation on this mass scale could potentially lead to needed psychosocial integration to improve the functionality of us all.
Defunctionalizing
The more you generalize how everything in society is merely socially constructed, the more easily you overlook what exists independent of human thought. The more you denounce all hierarchies as bad and claiming nothing is better than anything else, the more you turn postmodernism itself into a contradiction if asserting it is better than anything else.
The more you attempt to ease social-needs with overly-deconstructed postmodernist ideals, the more resistance you provoke among those with impacted self-needs. The more overgeneralized the ideas of social construction, the closer the reign of popgen deconstruction comes crashing to an end.
Refunctionalizing
The less you generalize how everything in society is socially constructed, the less you overlook what exists independent of human thought. The less you view all hierarchies as bad or claiming nothing can be better than anything else, the more you can benefit from postmodernism’s useful tools for critiquing our many cultural and other biases.
The less you attempt to ease social-needs with overly-deconstructed postmodernist ideals, the less resistance you engender among those with impacted self-needs. The more targeted postmodernism to culturally relative specifics, respecting the needs impacted, the more likely postmodernism’s contribution will endure beyond the current backlash to it.
24. Binarism
Binarism, as stated here, is generalizing two competing options to the exclusion of engaging and potentially integrating the best of all options, as it overlooks the nuance in between and beyond.
Need experience
Many routine areas of your life allow you to instantly choose between two competing options. Do you stay or leave? Do you decide now or later? Do you get a ride or drive yourself?
More complex areas call for more options than competing binary choices. The initial binaries can be viewed as a general starting point. Addressing specifics turns the initial binary into an array of specifics, to resolve needs on all sides.
But the more mass society settles for symfunctional norms, the more we are left with competing options. When stuck at the level of relief-generalizing, provisional opposites easily harden into opposing generalities to fight over for easing a competing priority of needs. To name a few…
-
judicial binarism: belief in opposing judicial generalities to ease competing justice needs; accuser-accused; prosecution-defense; good-bad guy; guilt-innocence.
-
political binarism: belief in opposing political generalities to ease competing politicized needs; liberal-conservative; voter-officeholder; donor-superPAC.
-
economic binarism: belief in opposing economic generalities to ease competing needs; employer-employee; producer-consumer; taxpayer-welfare dependent.
-
medical binarism: belief in opposing medical generalities to ease competing medical needs; sick-well; diagnosed-undiagnosed; doctor-patient; insured-uninsured.
-
educational binarism: belief in opposing educational generalities to ease competing educational needs; student-teacher; loan-grant; public-private; pass-fail.
Such opposing generalities tend to favor power relations. The side with more resources typically gets to dictate outcomes. When this coerces the vulnerable to serve the needs of the powerful at the vulnerable side’s expense, it can be called structural exaction.
If allowed to take nature’s course toward fully resolving such needs, these initial competing options fall into place as one of many meaningful steps toward meaningfully resolving needs, improving function, and removing pain.
Defunctionalizing
The more you generalize for relief, or for any reason, the less likely you appreciate any nuance beyond the first visibly opposing sides to an issue. The less you appreciate nuance beyond the given sides to an issue, the less open you are to discovering how these sides could be complementary to each other.
The less you appreciate this potential for complementary sides, the more likely you miss all the times where apparently opposing sides are actually part of an integrated whole. The less you integrate opposing sides into a complementary whole, the less your needs resolve, your pain persists, and your function declines.
Refunctionalizing
The less you generalize for relief, or for any reason, the more likely you appreciate nuance beyond the first visibly opposing sides to an issue. The more you appreciate nuance beyond the given sides to an issue, the more open you are to discovering how these sides could be complementary to each other.
The more you appreciate this potential for complementary sides, the more likely you will appreciate all the other times where apparently opposing sides are actually part of an integrated whole. The more you can integrate apparently opposing sides into a complementary whole, the more your needs resolve, your pain subsides, and your function improves.
25. Reactive vacillation
Reactive vacillation is shifting back and forth between opposing options, mostly to ease pain, overlooking potential to integrate into a new whole to resolve needs and remove pain. See binarism.
Need experience
You react efficiently and effectively during your most routine situations. No need to carefully decide how to drink from your bottle of water again and again.
In less routine situations, some reflection becomes necessary to resolve needs. But you likely first face novel situations with a binary option—to do this or do the opposite.
If already stuck in symfunctional strain, you are highly prone to choose one of those immediate opposing options. Relief-generalizing will pull you to ease whatever tension you feel.
As one option fails to remove all pain, you find yourself trying the opposite. You bounce back and forth between these contrasting options.
As long as you are trapped in pain, you likely lack the cognitive bandwidth to find an integrative whole. You miss the opportunity to resolve your needs, and to remove the pain.
You either react with what is most familiar to you. Or you slow down to reflect on possibilities.
Defunctionalizing
The more reactive you are in less familiar situations, the less likely your needs resolve. The more you react by choosing one side over another, the less likely you resolve needs. The more reactive to serve your own needs, the more conflict you engender.
Refunctionalizing
The less reactive you are in less familiar situations, the more likely your needs resolve. The less you react by choosing one side over another, the more likely you resolve needs. The less reactive to serve your own needs, the less conflict you engender.
Need experience
Nature pulls each of us to resolve our self-needs (such as autonomy, self-sufficiency, personal responsibility, and such). Nature also compels us to resolve our social-needs (such as inclusion, group identity, support, and such). While you experience each of these natural pulls at different times, your need for full functioning requires you to balance both over time.
Indigenous societies of low numbers tend to keep each other in check to balance their self-needs with their social-needs. Survival of the tribe could depend upon it. Mass societies show little if any concern for balancing self-needs with social-needs. Consequently, larger populations divide into those with dominant self-needs pitted against those with dominant social-needs. Politics emerged to sort out these competing priorities.
Anankelogy recognizes nature’s balancing process as psychosocial oscillation. Which enables full functioning by giving timely attention to both self-needs and social-needs, each in their season. The further you fall out of psychosocial balance, the less you can fully function.
26. Psychosocial reduction
Psychosocial reduction is reducing wellness to either internal psychological factors to the neglect of external socioenvironmental factors, or to external socioenvironmental factors to the neglect of internal psychological factors.
Defunctionalizing
Excess focus on self-needs to the neglect of social-needs, or excess focus on social-needs to the neglect of self-needs, limits full, healthy functioning. No one lives up to their full potential by trying to be totally self-sufficient, or by the other extreme of always relying on others for everything. The further you fall out of psychosocial balance, the more pain you endure.
Political polarization masks this defunction of psychosocial reduction. Otherwise, one could be more responsive to the needs on both political sides.
Refunctionalizing
The more you can address your self-needs and social-needs equally, toward resolving them, the more you can function in life. You can receive support from others when needed, and allowed solitude as needed. You will suffer less pain. You will be less prone to political extremes. You will know more peace and joy.
27. Psychosocial vacillation
Psychosocial vacillation is swinging between the extremes of self-needs and social-needs. It contrasts with natural psychosocial oscillation, which follows nature’s cyclic prompting.
Need experience
Nature prompts you to address your social-needs when starting or renewing a relationship. And at the start of your typical day, onto midday. And at the start and into the middle of your work week.
Nature prompts you to address your self-needs when you feel your relationships grow cold. And at the end of your typical day, into late evening. And at the start and throughout your weekend.
If you miss nature’s prompting to fully resolve your psychosocial needs in its proper season, you tend to get pulled wildly into extremes. When you are to address neglected self-needs at night, you find yourself stuck serving some social-needs. Then feel you must overgeneralize to relieve your neglected self-needs sometime midday. Your relationships suffer. You suffer.
Defunctionalizing
The longer you focus on unresolved self-needs, the more you get pulled later to serve unresolved social-needs. Which sets you up to obsess on painfully unmet social-needs when you would naturally be balancing your self-needs.
You then become like a washing machine with an imbalanced load, slamming loudly from side to side. Like psychosocial reduction, you become prone to political extremes for relief.
Refunctionalizing
The more you can resolve your self-needs when you are naturally alone, and social-needs when you are naturally with others, the better you can function in life. This can allow any psychosocial vacillation to shift to the more calming psychosocial oscillation. You will suffer less. You will be less prone to political extremes or damaged relationships. And you will know more peace and joy.
28. Contra-opposition
Contra-opposition is overgeneralized opposition, for easing pain, that provokes the needs of those opposed. It tends to ignite backlash. It is a common precursor to reflexive reinforcement.
Need experience
You have heard that you must take a moral stand, or be complicit with the wrong side. You must fight for what is right, or lose it to what is wrong. This often slides into a popgen version where you generalize the “other” as wrong. Opposing what another needs does not extinguish moral conflict, but enflames it. There is no point in opposing the needs themselves.
Opposition rarely distinguishes between popgen exaggerations and the original claims that apparently worked for large numbers of people. Almost no one totally opposes socialism, or totally opposes capitalism, for example. Not without opposing the eight-hour workday that produces smartphones, resulting from an integration of socialism and capitalism.
Most of us see through attempts to characterize some negative feature as exemplary to the whole lot. Not recognizing and affirming the needs behind each position, apart from how they are expressed, is a common defunction. There is no such thing as opposing the needs themselves. Opposing someone's thirst, or opposing another's prioritized need for social supports, can never alter the need itself.
Needs exist as objective phenomenon. The fact of your thirst, or your prioritized need for inclusion amidst systemic exclusion, or your prioritized need for self-initiative amidst smothering government imposition, all exist apart from preferences. Opposition to the needs themselves (as opposed how you should act toward them) easily reinforces their vehement expression.
Your needs are never open to any democratic vote. How you address those needs in public spaces falls within the realm of choices, and public critique. But the needs themselves persist no matter who disagrees with them. There can never be any legitimate opposition to the needs themselves. Only affirmation you experience them.
What you reactively resist you reflexively reinforce. For example, opposing identity politics without addressing the specific needs identity politics exists to serve can easily reinforce identity politics. The opposition to their prioritized social-needs prompts them to dig in their heels and champion their relief belief all the more.
For example, opposing right populism without addressing the specific needs right populism exists to serve can easily reinforce right populism. The opposition to their prioritized self-needs prompts them to dig in their heels and champion their relief generalizing all the more.
The more effort to push back on one side trying to address their needs, the more they naturally push back. The more this provokes the very thing ostensibly opposed. Instead of resolving needs to remove pain and raise functioning, mutual defensiveness sinks in. The standard applied sets the standard replied.
Find more about this phenomenon in the next entry, reflexive reinforcement.
Defunctionalizing
Excess focus on self-needs to the neglect of social-needs, or excess focus on social-needs to the neglect of self-needs, limits full, healthy functioning. No one lives up to their full potential by trying to be totally self-sufficient, or by the other extreme of always relying on others for everything. The further you fall out of psychosocial balance, the more pain you endure.
Political polarization masks this defunction of psychosocial reduction. Otherwise, one could be more responsive to the needs on both political sides.
Refunctionalizing
The more you can address your self-needs and social-needs equally, toward resolving them, the more you can function in life. You can receive support from others when needed, and allowed solitude as needed. You will suffer less pain. You will be less prone to political extremes. You will know more peace and joy.
29. Reflexive reinforcement
Reflexive reinforcement is strengthening something opposed by reacting to it in ways provoking its defenses, and actually producing more of what is ostensibly opposed. It is a common consequence of contra-opposition.
Need experience
Opposing what another needs does not extinguish moral conflict, but enflames it. A rush into battle risks missing the vital distinction between how others address their impactful needs and the inflexible needs themselves. Nature-based anankelogy observes a four-phase cycle that perpetuates the conflict.
1. Generalize against. You might only be vaguely aware of a threat. Pain tempts you to generalize. You can attract more support when steering clear of specifics that can’t apply to all. You simply agree to oppose some common foe. You oppose them for daring to have needs that affect you.
2. Relieve with overgeneralizing opposite. When steeped in pain, it’s hard to see beyond binary options. To you at that moment, the issue is clearly black-and-white. Us-against-them. Overgeneralizing for relief can deceive you into accepting as true what is factually false.
3. Reinforce the pain. If you’re only relieving your pain, you’re not addressing the needs behind that pain. You can be so attached for desperate relief that you are absolutely certain you’re right, while your action absolutely reinforces your pain.
4. Blame the unfamiliar. “For most of us,” writes Margaret and Jordan Paul, “the pain we feel is preferable to the pain we fear.” Instead of confronting the pain of the unknown, you blame the unknown. You accost those you see as unacceptably different because their endurance of pain and more responsiveness to needs feels dangerously strange to you. You scapegoat the very ones who could help you resolve your painful needs.
Each time through this cycle, you end up reinforcing what you initially tried to avoid. Your manifest intent—the one you visibly claim as your purpose—seeks to confront a barrier to easing your needs. Your latent intent—your actual purpose beneath the visible surface— seeks to ease your pain by blaming it on the opposed “other.” If your latent intent provides you more meaning than your manifest intent, you dare not personally engage the opposed other, lest the conflict resolves and drains you of meaningful opposition.
You grow attached to the familiarity of the fight. Also called contra-conflict, this can be applied to specific situations. Like when well-managing progressive ally culture gets stuck in overdrive, producing more of what they ostensibly oppose.
Contra-racism. Anti-racist activists who shame deep-oriented for potentially career-ending slights repel many of them back into white-only spaces, where their implicit biases can run unchecked.
Contra-rape. MeToo activists resorting to public shaming of men who ogle women risk pushing such men further away from the intimate connections they need, increasing the risk of assaults.
Contra-transphobia. Trans allies denouncing incidental misgendering as privileged “hate” risks inciting a backlash that can scare trans like me back into hiding.
This pattern also applies to right-leaning activists slipping into contra-opposition. There is a way to effectively oppose threats. This ineffective approach features some common traits.
-
This opposition tends to be emotionally intense. There is no impact engaging. Pain tends to fuel the opposing stance more than love.
-
This opposition tends to be focused on relief. Little if any concern is given to resolving the needs causing the pain.
-
This opposition tends to rely on generalizations. Some of them are obvious overgeneralizations. Other people, instead of what they do, are generalized as bad.
-
This opposition tends to lack accountability. They may not even realize the feared opposite is coming true. The reaction to historical trauma risks more trauma.
Consider how this applies to others generalized oppositions. Here is a short list of other contra-oppositions.
-
Contra-sexism.
-
Contra-homophobia.
-
Contra-poverty.
-
Contra-extortion.
-
Contra-homelessness.
-
Contra-healthcare.
-
Contra-addiction.
-
Contra-oppression.
-
Contra-tyranny.
-
Contra-violence.
-
Contra-justice.
-
Contra-religious freedom.
When this opposition produces a thrill of winning over dreaded others, it can slip into conflict porn. Overgeneralized opposition almost always diminishes the functioning of the opposers. The opposed may even thrive, as they address more and more of their needs toward full resolution.
Opposing what another needs does not extinguish moral conflict, but enflames it.
Defunctionalizing
The more intense your anger toward others, the less likely you distinguish between what they did and their inflexible needs behind what they did. The more you react in anger, the more you risk reinforcing their rejected actions. The longer you get stuck reinforcing what you rejected in the other, the less oriented to resolve needs.
Refunctionalizing
The less intense your anger toward others, the more likely you distinguish between what they did and their inflexible needs behind what they did. The less you react in anger, the less you reinforce their rejected actions. The sooner you break free from reinforcing what you rejected in the other, the more oriented to resolve needs.
30. Conflict porn
Conflict porn is indulging in contentiousness with others, more for the thrill of winning over another than to resolve any needs.
Need experience
If your intent is less to resolve needs causing pain and more for relief at the expense of others with a different priority of needs, it can be easy to desire the fight itself. Normative alienation and mass avoidance allow you to ignore the harm.
You may even unconsciously sabotage a need-resolving solution, lest it robs you of the fight you relish. Contra-opposition ensures what you enjoy fighting will persistently fight back. Moralization of pain may increase your self-indignation. You may even turn violent against what or who you oppose, especially with the anonymity of mob violence.
Violence is weakness turned outward. Resilience is strength turned inward. Maturity leads away from such indulgent contests. And more toward the liberation of resolved needs.
Violence is weakness turned outward. Resilience is strength turned inward.
Defunctionalizing
The longer you focus on unresolved self-needs, the more you get pulled later to serve unresolved social-needs. Which sets you up to obsess on painfully unmet social-needs when you would naturally be balancing your self-needs.
You then become like a washing machine with an imbalanced load, slamming loudly from side to side. Like psychosocial reduction, you become prone to political extremes for relief.
Refunctionalizing
The more you can resolve your self-needs when you are naturally alone, and social-needs when you are naturally with others, the better you can function in life. This can allow any psychosocial vacillation to shift to the more calming psychosocial oscillation. You will suffer less. You will be less prone to political extremes or damaged relationships. And you will know more peace and joy.
31. Enabled immaturity
Enabled immaturity is allowance for childish behavior not kept accountable to higher and rightfully expected developmental standards. It normalizes irresponsibility.
Need experience
If you yourself lack in some developmental qualities, you may feel it unfair to hold others to a high developmental standard. You may view maturity as a laudable aspiration, but unrealistic to hold anyone to that seemingly unreachable standard.
If excelling in some popular qualities, you may find it easier to overlook the lack of quality in other areas. You may even find it inspiring, that someone of such diminished maturity can achieve so much then you can perhaps achieve more.
You can think of enabling a powerholder’s immaturity in four regressive ways.
1. Permitted immaturity. When expected developmental standards are overlooked. E.g., accommodating a popular leader who throws temper tantrums.
2. Endorsed immaturity. When overlooking expected developmental standards is applauded. E.g., laughing at a racist joke.
3. Incentivized immaturity. When overlooking expected developmental standards is rewarded. E.g., rewarded with a promotion for denigrating others with catchy schoolyard names.
4. Required immaturity. When overlooking expected developmental standards is compulsory. E.g., ordered by your boss to terminate an underling for failing to show complete loyalty to your boss.
If a trusted leader models a lower quality of human interaction, you may find it easier to rationalize your imperfections. You can justify overgeneralizing others as worthy of disparaging remarks, or denounce whole institutions as bad with prejudicial evidence. When such immaturity and unwise behavior gets challenged, and then ignored in favor of normalized lowered functioning among us all, it can lead to enabled evil.
Defunctionalizing
The less you respond appropriately to presenting needs, the less you can fully function. The more enabled by others to respond poorly to presenting needs, the lower the overall functioning.
Refunctionalizing
The more you respond appropriately to presenting needs, the more you can fully function. The more enabled by others to respond wisely to presenting needs, the higher the overall functioning.
32. Minimized responsiveness
Minimized responsiveness is summarily discounting or rejecting what another believes or says solely to ease one’s own discomfort at the expense of the other.
Need experience
Ideally, you promptly respond to your needs and the needs of others closest to you. And you readily respect the needs others express to you.
In reality, symfunctional strain diminishes your responsiveness. You can believe love is the Greatest Commandment, but then minimize it as merely aspiration. “No one loves others all the time,” you can tell yourself. So you can excuse your lack of responsiveness to the needs of those standing right next to you.
Normative alienation and nomoscentricity holds you at a distance. Mass avoidance lets you off the hook. You can relief-believe that they made individual choices to put them where they are, so it’s not your responsibility to help any.
The more your own needs could more fully resolve, to escape from symfunctional strain, the easier it would be for you to respond to the needs of others. The more loved, the easier to love. Love must start somewhere. Right?
Defunctionalizing
The less responsive you are to the needs of others, the less they tend to respond to yours. The less others respond to your needs, the more you are left to struggle on your own. The more you struggle on your own, the less you can resolve your social-needs. The less your social-needs resolve, the harder to respond to the needs of others.
Refunctionalizing
The more responsive you are to the needs of others, the more they tend to respond to yours. The more others respond to your needs, the less you are left to struggle on your own. The more support you receive when needed, the more you can resolve your social-needs. The more your social-needs resolve, the easier to be to respond to the needs of others.
33. Self-serving dismissiveness
Self-serving dismissiveness is summarily discounting or rejecting what another believes or says solely to ease one’s own discomfort.
Need experience
Mass avoidance and popgen rationalism lets you dismiss out of hand what seems nonsensical to you. Instead of engaging others to discover their affected needs, you disregard their words or actions as pointless. As if needs conform to our ideas of reason, you discount them as unreasonable.
If what they said aligned with your prioritized needs, and how you experience them, you would readily listen. Perhaps even agree. How others affect your prioritized needs governs your reactions to others.
With normative alienation handing overhead, you think in the binarism terms of agree or disagree with presenting sides. You don’t think to listen for what has yet to be spoken, for what they cannot yet find courage to utter to you.
Again, the focus here is on relief-belief amidst symfunctional strain. It’s easier to dismiss what others are saying if it risks adding to your growing level of discomfort of unmet needs.
Defunctionalizing
The more you brusquely disregard what another is trying to tell you, the less you capture of the needs behind their dismissed expression. The less you know of their affected needs, including the need to be heard, the less trust they can have in you. The less trust they have in you, the more likely there is miscommunication between you.
With less communication, there is less cooperation to help resolve needs. More pain gets in the way. Less functioning is likely to occur.
Refunctionalizing
The more you make it safe for another to drop their guard and expose more of their vulnerabilities, the quicker you can move pass small talk to address relevant specifics of each other’s impacted needs. The more attentive you are, the more you can hear what is not being said or what may never be put into words.
The more you communicate and affirm each other’s affected needs, the more trust you build. More needs can resolve. Less pain gets in the way. Better functioning can unfold.
34. Self-righteous defensiveness
Self-righteous defensiveness is resisting any personal or social awareness of one’s own imperfections, especially to guard any culpability in negative impacts.
Need experience
Your emotions naturally prioritize your self-continuance. If sensing a threat, your emotions instantly circle the wagons. Of course, not every threat is as threatening as it appears. In the absence of impact engaging, accusations can sound like objectionable overgeneralizations.
Unless expressed in actionable terms, accusations tend to provoke your defenses. You could embrace the discomfort of another’s ire to find how you can be more responsive. You likely put up your guard before considering that option. Meanwhile, you lock into mutual defensiveness. You hold in your hurt, as they hold in theirs.
You both focus more on easing the pain than attending to the needs behind that pain. If facing your culpability, you may wish to retreat from any risk of losing your social standing. Guilt undercuts your social-needs. Which jeopardizes some of your self-needs. For example, you cannot remain autonomous if constantly under the community’s shameful eye.
You may deny any responsibility. You could be right. Or while under guard you cannot recognize your impact on others. You could hinder other’s from resolving their needs. You could fit what psychology refers to as ego-syntonic—you feel no dissonance so it must not be your fault.
Until you can freely sort out who is accurately responsible for what, and what can be done about it, the functioning level on both sides can be limited.
Defunctionalizing
The less you courageously face other’s complaints about how you ostensibly hinder their needs, the less likely responsibilities will be sorted. The more you resist public awareness of your own imperfections, the more likely your imperfections limit your full functioning. The less you welcome critical feedback, the less you can return to full functioning.
Refunctionalizing
The more you courageously face other’s complaints about how you ostensibly hinder their needs, the more likely responsibilities will be sorted. The less you resist public awareness of your own imperfections, the less likely your imperfections limit your full functioning. The more you welcome critical feedback, the more you can return to full functioning.
35. Generalization dependency
Generalization dependency turns temporary or provisional generalizations into long-term beliefs and decisions. It presents as entrenched reliance on more simplified views to avoid discomfort of engaging relevant specifics, which are necessary to resolve needs.
Need experience
Generalizations produce a natural starting point. They prove useful when kept provisional. But these stepping stones can quickly harden into stumbling blocks when satisfactorily easing pain.
When vague awareness of some need gives way to binary options, you may feel an urgency to ease its pain. You may slip into relying on those opposing generalizations. You may generalize against others. If others counter with an opposing generalization to fight against you, you both likely will lock into battle. Fighting generalizations with generalizations easily spins each side to mutually hostile extremes.
Once locked into pain, both sides routinely sidestep nuance. While indulging in conflict, you skip the discipline to address relevant details for the low hanging fruit of pain relief. You become emotionally attached to oversimplified answers. You habitually evade specific needs.
As you avoid resolving specific needs, you feel stuck in pain. You now generalize your pain as the coming from the other side. You indulge in the immaturity of insisting problems are all their fault. When broadened into a mass institution like divisive politics or adversarial justice, painfully lower functioning becomes broadly normalized. Symfunctionality slips into dysfunctionality, or worse.
Defunctionalizing
The more you rely on generalizations to ease your needs, the less likely you will process the details necessary to resolve your specific needs. The more you rely on generalizing, the fewer of your needs can fully resolve, and the more you are left in pain from these unresolved needs.
The less you relate to nuance, by not using tools like relational knowing, the more likely you will rely even further on generalizations to ease your persisting pain. The more trapped in this cycle of relying too much on generalizations, the fewer needs resolve and the less you can function.
Refunctionalizing
The less you rely on generalizations to ease your needs, the more likely you will process the details necessary to resolve your specific needs. The less you rely on generalizing, the more of your needs can fully resolve, and the less pain you suffer.
The more you relate to nuance, by using tools like relational knowing, the less likely you will rely on generalizations to ease your pain. The more you replace provisional generalizations with applicable specifics, the more needs you can resolve and the more you can function.
36. Relief bias
Relief bias is prioritizing the easing of pain over careful consideration of resolving needs to remove pain.
Need experience
Whatever eases pain of unresolved needs tends to work more quickly than what proves necessary to remove that pain. The arduous journey to resolve a longstanding need will eventually remove that pain. But that unbearable load could take too long for some.
Provisional generalizing can prove necessary for transitional relief. If you cannot wait to see a doctor to close a wound, for example, first aid and aspirin will suffice. The stepping stones of temporary relief can harden into the stumbling block of long-term pain management.
As you adjust to managed pain of a few unresolved needs, you can become accustomed to reacting to every painful need with coping mechanisms. You then habitually prioritize discomfort avoidance with each evoked need.
Your focal level steadily increases. Aware to alert to alarm. Creeping normality sets in. You get comfortably used to always being in pain. Your pain insists on warning you of threats, so you cannot get rid of your pain without facing each threat. So you unconsciously become addicted to this cycle of increasing pain and pain relief.
This tends to be common among the wide-oriented, expressed in progressivism. Generalizing for social change can betray avoidance of discomfort. But this also presents among the deep-oriented who also depend on generalizations.
Defunctionalizing
The less your needs resolve, the more you generalize to relieve its pain. The more you generalize for pain relief, the more you bypass specifics essential to resolve each need. The more pain you bear from an increasing number of unresolved needs, the more likely you cling to the comfort of generalizations offering relief.
Refunctionalizing
The more your needs resolve, the less you generalize to relieve its pain. The less you generalize for pain relief, the more you engage specifics essential to resolve each need. The less pain you bear from an increasing number of resolved needs, the less likely you cling to the comfort of generalizations.
37. Familiarity bias
Familiarity bias is prioritizing one’s more accustomed way to cope with needs, when resolving needs seem too strange to consider.
Need experience
Whatever worked fine for you in the past should continue working as expected into the future. Or so goes the comforting generalization. If your life runs thick with reliable routines, you may never notice the growing number of exceptions.
You naturally start with your best acquainted approaches to each need. But if the situation looks different, you may need to shift gears to resolve needs. What works everyday for you in your hometown could quickly fail when reacting that way in the city.
When challenged to address a need in an unfamiliar situation, you tend to fall back on comforting routines. You rely on its predictability. Even if it leaves you in more of the same pain. You find it easier to handle the pain you know than the pain you don’t know.
You rarely encounter new situations, so you are not in the habit to pause and reflect. You typically get intuitively by on a simpler binary approach. It’s either this or that. No reason to reason your way through everything. But in more novel situations, your quick reactions quickly fall short. You could adjust, but instead you keep falling back to the comfort of what you know best. Even if this means staying in constant yet familiar pain.
This tends to be common among the deep-oriented, expressed in far-right conservatism. Generalizing to conserve every and all traditions betray avoidance of discomfort. But this also presents among the wide-oriented who also depend on generalizations.
Defunctionalizing
The less familiar the situation, the less likely your typical reactions can help you resolve the need. The less novel your situation, the more your familiar reactions can result in resolved needs. The less you expect the unexpected, the less prepared you will be to adjust as necessary to fully resolve needs.
Refunctionalizing
The more familiar the situation, the more likely your typical reactions can help you resolve the need. The more novel your situation, the more you can resolve your needs with a novel approach. The more you expect the unexpected, the readier you will be to adjust as necessary to fully resolve needs.
38. Imposed relief
Imposed relief is coercion to accept pain relief, interfering with opportunity to remove pain by resolving the needs. While applicable to interpersonal relationships, this typically involves institutions controlling access to essential resources.
Need experience
Temporary relief from pain is often helpful. It can prove necessary to regain focus. With renewed focus, you can then respond more thoroughly to the needs behind the pain. To then resolve the needs to remove the cause of that pain.
Unfortunately, offered pain relief is seldom kept transitional. Especially where incentives remain in place to keep one tied to continual relief regimes. Normative alienation and nomoscentricity can conventionalize such damning pain avoidance.
Pain relief generalized to last indefinitely basically condemns one to perpetual pain. Instead of encouraging them to embrace discomfort, they are held down by the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” Institutions serving those in pain tend to expect the served to remain in some form of pain. Such institutions risk normalizing unresolved needs.
Mass institutions regularly limit options to two competing options. Those in need can only choose opposing categories. These binarism categories normalize evasion of nuance essential to resolve their affected needs.
-
Judicial binarism: opposing judicial categories to ease pain of competing justice needs; accuser-accused; victim-victimizer; good-bad guy; guilt-innocence. Attending to degrees of guilt or to see a victim as a passive-aggressive victimizer is ignored. The adversarial justice system is accountable to procedural justice and not to end results. It tends to perpetuate pain in the name of relieving the trauma of endured violence.
-
Political binarism: opposing political categories to ease pain of competing politicized needs; liberal-conservative; voter-officeholder; political pundit-viewer. Attending to nuance between deep-oriented and wide-oriented or tying legitimacy of representation to resolved needs gets overlooked. Divisive politics tends to be more accountable to big donors than how the people’s needs can freely and fully resolve. It perpetuates the pain of unresolved politicized needs.
Note: this tends to be a common trap for generalization-dependent wide-oriented. In their diversely populated lives with limited access to resources, they vulnerably settle for discomfort avoidance.
Defunctionalizing
The less an institution makes room for nuance, the more likely those needing the institution’s service get stuck in the pain of unresolved needs. The more these institutions normalize limited binary choices, the lower the functioning level of those vulnerable to these institutions.
Refunctionalizing
The more an institution makes room for nuance, the less likely those needing the institution’s service get stuck in the pain of unresolved needs. The less these institutions normalize limited binary choices, the higher the functioning level of those vulnerable to these institutions.
39. Impact avoidance
Impact avoidance is conveniently overlooking the damaging impacts from past traumatizing events. This typically applies to overlooking such damage in others, but can include neglecting the detrimental effects of one’s own past history.
Need experience
You don’t know what you don’t know. And hardly no one announces how traumatized they are from past events. They may not realize the depths of damage themselves. So you don’t consider the many invisible scars of past victimization, systemic abuse, widespread discrimination or any number of histories of trauma.
When you trigger their trauma by something you innocently said or done, you’re aghast by their emotionally intense reaction. Your guard goes up. Their trauma tries to protect them from any risk of similar hurt. Including your defensive reaction. Mutual defensiveness ensures needs to not resolve. Both sides tend to be dismissive of the other.
Perhaps you have an inkling they carry past wounds. “It wasn’t my fault,” you tell yourself, “so why take it out on me?” Both sides undergo some cognitive contraction that limits perspective taking. Rational supremacy trips you up to expect them to make clear choices honestly not clear to them, or to you. Contra-opposition may leak in, with reflexive reinforcement. Ignoring the impacted needs does no one any favors.
Note: this tends to be a common trap for generalization-dependent deep-oriented. In their naturally cohesive lives, they are less likely to be accosted with other’s trauma they ostensibly caused.
Defunctionalizing
The more unprocessed trauma you carry from past experiences, the more easily you can be provoked to rage or run.
The less aware of other’s history of endured trauma, the more easily you can incidentally provoke them to rage or run.
Refunctionalizing
The less unprocessed trauma you carry from past experiences, the less easily you can be provoked to rage or run.
The more aware of other’s history of endured trauma, the less likely you will incidentally provoke them to rage or run.
40. Impact neglect
Impact neglect is overlooking the effect of proposed or actual change on others, when not considering their specific needs in decisions.
Need experience
Where impact avoidance overlooks past limits on resolving needs, this overlooks current limits on resolving needs. In the absence of impact engaging, a call for change frequently overlooks how such proposed change impacts others.
What benefits you could prove detrimental to others. More government intervention that helps you ease some needs could limit others from continuing to resolve their needs. Less government intervention that frees you to ease some needs could prevent others from resolving some of their needs.
Such binarism options tend to normalize impact neglect. The focus on polarizing extremes serves as a recipe for ignoring how one side affects the other. Instead of mutual support for each other’s affected needs, contra-opposition easily gives way to mutual conflict porn. Each side becomes complicit in holding the other side down to lower levels of functioning.
Starting with love tends to inspire consideration for how one’s actions or call for change impacts others. Instead of claiming the state’s exclusive use of violence is to enforce your selfish needs, you are compelled by anankelogic love to prioritize regard for the affected needs of others. And only after all relevant needs are addressed in proposed change can that policy be adopted legitimately.
Competitive legitimacy ties any policy change to how well it allows all to freely and fully resolve their needs. Proposed policy changes that neglects to consider its impact on anyone’s ability to freely and resolve their needs will inevitably lack full legitimacy. And provoke pushback.
Defunctionalizing
The less a public policy considers its potential impact on others, the more likely it provokes pushback to resist its adoption.
Refunctionalizing
The more a public policy considers its potential impact on others, the less likely it provokes pushback to resist its adoption.
41. Rational supremacy
Rational supremacy is raising the role of impassionate cognition over the holistic process of need-reporting emotions. It effectively represses one’s uncomfortable emotions in ways undermining the resolution of emotion-reported needs.
Need experience
If you impact others, or others impact you, you can avoid the discomfort of vulnerabilities with an appeal to reason. Arguing allows you to avoid emotional honesty. Rationality can externalize your biases in the name of reason.
Instead of resolving needs, you would use rational supremacy to relieve pain. To resolve needs with engaged reasoning, you would used rational primacy. The difference recognizes situations where pausing to reflect with reason is the primary option—but does not exclude the role of emotions to convey needs.
Rational primacy is disciplined where rational supremacy indulges the feeling to suppress feelings. Feeling ignored report their needs in other painful ways. Your feelings either serve you, or you serve them.
You can counter the comforting pull toward rational supremacy with the useful distinction between the anankelogic tools of a static critique and dynamic critique.
In a static critique, you state your disagreement to a questioned position with the assumption of rational debating and unengaged arguing of impersonal facts. The intent is usually to ease discomfort of affected needs with little if any intent to address or resolve such needs. It presumes normative alienation.
With dynamic critique, you invite a dialogue to learn how the questioned position was formed from experiences and affected needs. You drop your guard to cultivate mutual understanding toward mutual responsiveness to affected needs. The intent is for all to resolve their relevant needs.
Static critique can lead to good science. Good science provides useful answers. Dynamic critique inspires great science. Great science inspires better questions to ask and test. Good science helps to ease needs. Great science can do more to enable full resolution of needs.
Defunctionalizing
The more you rely on a rational approach, the more likely you avoid addressing the vulnerable needs involved. The less you integrate your need-conveying emotions with your impassionate reasoning, the fewer needs can resolve.
Refunctionalizing
The less you rely on a rational approach, the more likely you address the vulnerable needs involved. The more you integrate your need-conveying emotions with your impassionate reasoning, the more needs can resolve.
42. Critique conflation
Critique conflation lumps together the weak points of criticism of an idea or decision with its stronger points, or with its attempts to identify, express and address overlooked needs.
Need experience
Binary options often overgeneralize what we dispute. They occasionally present false comparisons. For example, critiquing capitalism or critiquing socialism as the opposite of each other overlooks how their combined yet imbalanced coexistence impacts our needs. Removing one or the other will not resolve our affected needs.
It is simpler to argue against a generalized version of something than unpack its specific elements undercutting needs. It is simpler to charge a company with violating clean water regulations for regulatory enforcement, for example, than to appreciate the nuance of how filtered waste water is safe enough to return to our public waterways in contrast to the state’s presenting conflict of interest to impose fines to fund itself.
It is simpler to categorize as guilty or not guilty than to assess a degree of culpability on every side of a conflict. It is simpler and easier to conflate a jaywalking person of color in a depressed neighborhood with gang-related drug trafficking in the name of fighting crime than to assess each other’s impacts on the rights and responsibilities of all involved.
Fewer needs resolve when you conflate “lateral” distinctions with “vertical” distinctions. Lateral differences are false comparisons. Lefthanded versus righthanded. Catholic or Protestant. Gay or straight. Cisgender or transgender. Old or young. Deep-oriented or wide-oriented.
Vertical distinctions of quality matter more. Resolve needs or relieve its pain to let problems fester. Rely on generalizations to avoid uncomfortable specifics or face specifics essential to resolve needs. Obey all rules to maintain a symfunctional order or prioritize resolving needs for which rules exist.
Two kinds of critique conflation are discussed in these pages.
[1] Conflating the false comparison in a lateral approach with the meaningful contrasts in a vertical approach. E.g., lumping political differences expressing a different priority of needs with ideological overgeneralizations geared more for relief than resolution of politicized needs.
[2] Failure to distinguish between a critically disciplined philosophical tool, applied to specific situations with academic accountabilities, and its popgen version applied generally, mostly to ease pain with few if any accountabilities.
Defunctionalizing
The more you generalize opposing options, the more likely you miss distinctions between elements that resolve needs and elements easing pain. The less you distinguish between what resolve needs and what merely relieves pain, the more you become complicit in lowering functioning.
Refunctionalizing
The less you generalize opposing options, the more likely you find distinctions between elements that resolve needs and elements easing pain. The more you distinguish between what resolve needs and what merely relieves pain, the more you can enable higher functioning.
43. Structural exaction
Structural exaction is when a power relation legally coerces the powerless side to involuntarily transfer something of value to the powerful side, without accountably allowing for impacted needs to resolve, whether either side in a power relation is aware of this coercion or not.
Need experience
Those holding more resources than another in a relation tends to impact the relation more than impacted by it. This is by definition a power relation. One side is the powerholder. The other is the relatively powerless. The powerholder tends to exact value from the positionally powerless.
The less powerful tends to be coerced by the power differential to provide even more of its limited resources, out of fear of painful consequences. The powerful in the relationship—knowingly or unconsciously—exacts things of value from the less powerful.
With greater access to resources, the powerholder can coerce the powerless to accept this legally privileged form of extortion. While the powerless risks being charged with extortion if insisting the powerholder give back some of this questionably gained value.
“After all,” the powerholder explains, “the powerless entered into the relationship accepting the terms of service.” Short of better options, the powerless settled for this. But the consequences too often leave the powerless in trouble. The powerful are also unlikely to resolve their needs while clinging to roles preventing others from fully respecting their needs.
Once acclimated to this structural exaction, the powerless find it more difficult to resolve its many needs. It may be next to impossible. Such structural exaction locks the powerless and the powerful into symfunctional strain. Overall functioning suffers.
Defunctionalizing
The more you control resources others require, the more they defer to your influence. The more you press them to serve your will (consciously or unconsciously), the more they acquiesce largely out of fear of losing access to the resources they need that you control. The less genuinely they can serve your needs ,or resolve their own.
The more these power relations persist unchecked, the fewer needs resolve on both sides. More pain persists. Less overall functioning can occur.
Refunctionalizing
The more mindful of your control over resources others require, the more mindful you can be to how your power can distort relations. The less you press them to serve your will, the less they acquiesce out of fear of losing access to the resources they need that you control. The more genuinely they can serve your needs.
The less these power relations run unchecked, the more these power-impacted needs can resolve on both sides. Less pain persists. More overall functioning can occur.
44. Nonaccountable influence
Nonaccountable influence is exacting social pressure on others, typically those more vulnerable for lack of resources, without having to answer for their negative impacts.
Need experience
Those who can influence others, from their positions of power, are understandably held to a higher standard. If focusing primarily or exclusively on their own needs, those in power risk negatively impacting those vulnerable to their influence.
Those who study power will tell you that power does not so much corrupts as it reveals. Few leaders have all their stuff together. Rulers trapped in symfunctional strain generally lead others down that familiar path.
If not proactively engendering honest feedback, those in positions of power tend to coerce those under their influence into serving their interests. Understandably, those in positions of power who are responsible to serve large-scale needs (like governance, curbing violence, feeding the poor) tend to be too busy to gage the impact of their influence.
Those in power may argue their influence is benign. They generally rely on rules and processes to ensure minimal to no harm to those they are tasked to impact. Professionals agree to abide by a set of ethics. They answer to grievance processes. They answer to those in higher authority. But none of these know what they do not know, nor may they think to ask. They typically lack ongoing data to validate or invalidate the assumptions behind these trusted accountability measures.
Power may coerce the vulnerable away from pursuing such data. The most vulnerable tend to be exploited in ways lowering their earning potential. Not only is this data beyond what they can afford, they cannot afford the time to think about it while struggling to get by. Those in power tend to benefit in many invisible ways that grant them deniability of their actual negative impacts upon the vulnerable.
Perhaps you are one of those under the subtle pressure of those in positions of influence.
-
employee to employer
-
student to teacher
-
citizen to police officer
-
taxpayer to IRS
-
crime victim to prosecutor
-
patient to doctor
-
declining senior to caregiver
-
client to counselor
You are told you have personal choices in each of these power relations. But you intuitively know that your freedom to make personal choices extends no further than your actual options. You can choose to maintain a positive attitude while resiliently enduring the harshest conditions you ever had to face. You cannot choose what a power relation cuts you off from accessing. And that has easily ignored consequences to your wellbeing—and to a society’s overall functioning.
Your personal responsiveness toward others coexists with other’s responsiveness toward you. Your personal responsibility to those in power sits no greater than their social responsibility toward you. The more over-responsible to them, to the point of overextending yourself, the less you can be responsible to yourself and to others. Wellness is psychosocial.
Pressured into avoiding worse consequences. Coerced acquiesces comes with a cost to their mental health. Mental health rarely exists solely within the individual, but instead involves what Durkheim called social facts. What appears to emanate from within usually results in reaction to pressures from without. Coercive power easily manifests in various mental health maladies and conditions.
-
mild to severe anxiety, slipping into various anxiety disorders,
-
declining physical health,
-
poor eating and exercise habits,
-
domestic violence,
-
destabilized families and communities,
-
income insecurity,
-
hopelessness, helplessness & powerlessness,
-
increasing external locus of control,
-
various addictions including substance use,
-
suicide ideation and behavior, and
-
deaths of despair.
Increasingly, the helping professions recognize external contributors to these maladies, including depression. A malady like depression is not all your fault. If you think deeply enough about it, stigma is earned by those who dare stigmatize you for conditions beyond your personal control. Including maladies resulting from being exploited by influential others.
We can understand your depressive symptoms as your body’s reaction to unaccounted power. Your body understandably denies you misspent energy. It redirects you away from appeasing harmful unaccountable influence. If stuck under the negative influence of those in positions of power, your body signals you to shift course. It uses what we categorize as symptoms of depression.
1. You feel a growing frustration. When pressured to serve the needs of powerful others at your own expense, you naturally feel frequently disappointed and irritated.
2. You lose concentration. Your body compels you to focus more on your neglected self. Your unresolved self-needs cry out for priority over your excessively attended social-needs.
3. You lose interest in once pleasurable activities. Nothing is much fun anymore without doing what you could purposely do with your life. If only powerful others would let you.
4. Your energy drains. Your body denies you misspent energy that robs you of rejuvenation. Fatigue pulls energy away from constantly pleasing others, against your own best interests.
5. You become restless. Your inner longings to reach your full potential, suppressed by powerful others, pumps the brakes. Sometimes this takes you for a frightening ride.
6. You have trouble sleeping. Your circadian rhythm slips off course when consumed by another’s schedule. When denied its meaningful purpose, your life may find little reason to get out of bed.
7. You feel inexplicably guilt. Guilt reports a contradiction between what you believe you should be doing for those in power and what you are compelled to do for your neglected yourself.
8. You feel hopeless. What hope is there to continually submit to powerful others who do not reciprocate as much respect for your needs?
9. You feel an overwhelming emptiness. Losing yourself from being consumed by powerful others empties you of self-sustaining meaning.
Each of these symptoms redirect your imbalanced focus on social-needs back to unattended self-needs. The more vulnerable to those in positions of power, the more at risk for depression. Yes, internal contributors to depression exist, but they tend to be overemphasized to the neglect of external contributors. Internal contributors to depression—or to anxiety and any other malady—cannot be sustainably corrected without addressing external contributors, starting with those from power relations. Wellness is psychosocial.
“What gets measured gets done” is perhaps a useful saw. Wherever the impact of those in power gets measured, their influence can be kept in check. For the most part, leaders seek legitimacy. They generally prefer the earned authority of willing followers over the disgruntled acquiescence of coerced authority. Sometimes they need to be told which is actually occurring under their noses.
With greater legitimate authority comes the credibility to lead others toward resolving needs. Where others under their influence lack the full liberty to resolve needs, their positions of power over them could reasonably be removed. Democratic ideals are best served when leaders link their needs to how well they impact the needs of those they serve.
Defunctionalizing
The less accountable you are to your impacts on vulnerable others, the more likely you negatively impact them. The more negative your impact, the more they appear to make poor decisions. The worse their decisions, the easier to rationalize your influence or control over their lives.
The more your negative impacts blocks them from resolving their needs, the less legitimate your influence in their life. The less legitimate your influence from negatively impacting their needs, the less overall functioning occurs, and more general pain.
Refunctionalizing
The more you are held accountable to your impacts on vulnerable others, the less likely you negatively impact them. The less you negatively impact them, the more they appear to make good decisions. The better their decisions, the easier to support your authority.
The more you enable them to resolve needs, the more legitimate your influence in their life. The more legitimate your influence from enabling needs to resolve, the higher overall functioning can occur, and less general pain is suffered.
45. Privileged coercive power
Privileged coercive power is manipulation or exploitation of others with less social power under sanction of social norms or cover of law. This applies when it results in hindering the socially less powerful to resolve their needs, or steer clear of avoidable needs.
There is no greater revolution than to revolve back to love.
Need experience
“Not many of us should become teachers,” warns the Book of James in the New Testament. At the time, teachers were the community leaders. So the warning is aptly applied to any leader today. Leaders, like those early teachers, are to be held to a stricter standard. Results matter.
One glance at this list of defunctions should impress how much stricter the standard can actually be. Normative alienation and generalization dependency, for example, create a lethal mix. Those in power can impact others in socially privileged ways, sanctioned by widely trusted generalizations. Little if any feedback loops exist to report this power’s adverse impacts in real time.
The consequences are far from academic. Those accumulating the resources to exact value from others gain greater access to institutional resources. They hire better equipped lawyers. They hire public relations to control the public narrative. They donate to politicians to bias their priorities. They manipulate legally—even without conscious attention—to “rig the system” in their need-easing favor.
Such unaccounted influence tends to feature the following items, at the expense of the exploited.
-
Privileged generalizing: Powerholder presents self-serving generalizations as the only available or viable options. These typically are binarism options keeping vulnerable populations fighting each other on the powerholders’ behalf.
-
Evasion of nuance: Powerholder sidesteps specifics necessary to resolve needs among the exploited. We cannot solve our specific problems from the level of generalizing that created them.
-
Hampering need-resolution: Distraction from details ensures needs of the exploited do not resolve.
-
Symfunctional strain normalization: Powerholder reminds exploited how things could be worse, or characterizes their situation as the best in the world—if only they personally optimized it.
-
Victim-blaming: Adverse consequences get readily dismissed as the exploited individual’s fault.
-
Atomization: Once coerced to follow power’s privileged generalizations, isolated individuals become vulnerable to more coercion. To relying on more comforting generalizations impeding needs.
-
Coerced acquiescence: Power manipulates them with carrot and stick. Powerholder attracts compliance by presenting a poor yet adaptable option as preferable to a painfully bad option.
-
Token grievance process: Powerholder convinces exploited they have an active role in how power treats them. Never mind the limited number of options.
-
Privileged denialism: Power rejects or dismisses out of hand viable objections by the exploited because they never suffer any immediate consequences. The exploited continue to endure the adverse consequences of power’s advantaged repudiation.
-
Mental health deficits: Coercive power easily provokes increased rates of anxiety disorders, major depression, substance use, suicide ideation and deaths of despair. Wellness is psychosocial. What power calls “mental illness” frequently masks psychosocially-based pathologies.
-
Results ignored: Normative alienation ensures power fails to recognize its complicity in rising mental health crises. Unaccounted influence protects itself under the legally sanctioned cloak of self-serving privileged generalizing. Rinse and repeat.
In our current era of global linkage, fewer of a powerholder’s needs can resolve while interfering with the needs of others. When lowering the functioning of the vulnerable, they lower their own functioning. They lose their own capacity for empathy, for love, for understanding, and so forth. Describing them as having power may be too generous. Power is not really power unless it resolves needs. Otherwise it is just coercive force.
If measurably culpable for the mental health collapse of the powerless, love challenges their own lack of unresolved needs. Until responsibly resolving their needs, their influence is to be suspended to curtail any further damage. All while affirming their value with grace and love, despite their shortcomings. If rejecting such love, their anankelogic legitimacy to hold power quickly collapses.
Those exploited by such power will find their best path to resolve their affected needs involves a commitment to love unconditionally. But if privileged power arrogantly persists on a harmful path, the wronged may have to crack the whip to clear the temple of those corrupting their sacred spaces. Any call to revolution is best led by the high moral leadership of love—of prioritizing the resolving of needs of all involved. Those in power resisting to resolve needs are to be removed from coercive influence with the deeper power of love. There is no greater revolution than to revolve back to love.
Power is not really power unless it resolves needs. Otherwise, it's just coercive force.
Defunctionalizing
The more one has resources to dictate outcomes, the more likely they coerce others with fewer resources. The more they coerce others, the less likely they responsibly resolve their own needs. The less they resolve their own needs, the more likely they lack need-resolving love in their life.
Refunctionalizing
The less one has resources to dictate outcomes, the less likely they coerce others with equal or more resources. The less they coerce others, the more likely they responsibly resolve their own needs. The more they resolve their own needs, the less likely they lack need-resolving love in their life.
46. Rationalized systemic failure
Rationalized systemic failure (RSF) refers to uncritical justification of mass institutions that systemically fail to serve its mission needs.
Need experience
Binary options exist to ease needs, but rarely resolve our more complicated needs. When these instantly conceivable binary options solidify into institutional norms, its conventionality sets us up for failure. Binary options too easily overgeneralize. We cannot solve our specific problems from the level of generalizing that created them.
Once you grow dependent upon institutional norms to ease your needs—with no viable vision for alternatives—you rationalize almost any shortcoming in that system. You believe what you need to believe. You believe competing binary options ease needs, even though they lack a path to resolve such needs. Challenges to that system feel like a threat to your only means to address such needs.
Such dependence on binary-based mass institutions (like adversarial justice and divisive politics) tend to follow a predictable pattern.
1) Binary options calcify into binarism. Competing options are presented as the only socially approved options.
2) Binarism applied provides relief-gen. Nuance necessary to resolve needs gets duly ignored.
3) Binarism results are rationalized. RSF becomes the third step, after relief-gen and after binarism.
Each binary-based mass institution presents its own RSF to keep itself going. Each is more accountable to cheapened democracy of eased pain than to liberating democracy of resolved needs.
-
Justifism. Justifying widespread shortcomings of adversarial justice. “We have the best criminal court system in the world!” It’s so good, we now have the most incarcerated in world history.
-
Politicism. Rationalizing failures in divisive politics. “Voters get to choose their own representatives.” Forget the fact that ballot options rarely if ever accountably resolve voter needs.
-
Economism. Defend wealth disparity as a natural consequence of business cycles. “A rising tide lifts all boats.” Some boats get more of a privileged lift than others. Other boats are sinking.
-
Medicalism. Excuse poor healthcare options. “We have the best healthcare system in the world.” So good, in fact, we have one of the unhealthiest populations in the developed world.”
-
Educationism. Minimizing problems in educational systems. “Those students took out those loans so they should pay them by the agreed terms.” Never mind about predatory debt peonage or failure of college degrees to result in meaningful employment.
-
Mediaism. Generalizing well-resourced ‘free press’ as free speech. “The First Amendment blah blah blah.” Meanwhile, media consumers manipulated for economic gain are rarely heard.
Defenders of these institutions often claim failure is only individual. “Participants are not applying it right.” Each of these build upon the shaky foundation of ideological individualism – personal choice responsibility ignoring impediments to resolving needs out of individual control. The foundational binary pits personal responsibility against collective responsibility, as if these are mutually exclusive. Individuals sometimes internalize the failure as all their own fault.
To put it bluntly, generalizing one side against the other generalized side creates two competing wrongs. Even if legal, enabling the state's exclusive claim to enforce both with violence. Two wrongs do not make a right, but sometimes they make a law.
We cannot solve our specific problems from the level of generalizing that created them.
Two wrongs do not make a right. But sometimes they make a law.
Defunctionalizing
The more institutions present competing options, it more it overlooks nuance necessary to resolve needs. The less these needs resolve by these trusted institutions, the more rigidly those in need tend to defend such institutions trusted to provide pain relief.
Refunctionalizing
The more institutions present complementary options, it more it can engage nuance necessary to resolve needs. The more these needs resolve by these trusted institutions, the more open are these institutions to corrective feedback to fully resolve needs.
47. Mass institution mission creep
Mass institution mission creep (MIMC) recognizes the tendency of our largest institutions to shift away from its founding purpose, and slide toward whatever helps keep it going.
Need experience
Mass societies like ours divide labor into specialized fields, to manage the increasing complexities of social needs. Small societies avoid this problem by diffusing responsibilities to ensure each can provide sufficiently for themselves when cutoff from the larger tribal unit.
Larger societies create ‘mass institutions’ with those specialized to serve “public” or common needs. Individuals cannot adequately resolve these types of needs on their own. These include smaller institutions, at the state or municipality or nonprofit level. Because they serve public needs, they generally fall outside the purview of private sector enterprises. They ostensibly are kept accountable to the public good through democratic means.
These mass institutions are created to serve a specific set of needs, identified here as mission needs. The mass institution of the judiciary, for example, is commissioned to serve justice needs. Over time, the emphasis shifts from primarily serving justice needs to serving its own institutional needs. This shift often goes unnoticed by those working in these institutions, and sometimes even defensively denied. As Upton Sinclair warned us, it’s hard to see what your paycheck doesn’t let you see.
Mission creep tends to be gradual. You can identify this slippage along thise function array.
-
Mission dynamism. Continual focus on facilitating resolution of mission needs. No creep.
-
Mission drift. Emphasis on the binarism of opposing interests overlooking specifics. Creep emerges.
-
Mission deviation. Mostly managing relief from mounting pain of unresolved mission needs.
-
Mission departure. Controlling the struggle to survive from lack of resolved mission needs.
Institution function array
Now apply this array to mass institutions. The larger the institution, the more it tends to rely on generalizing to address mission needs.
-
Institutional dynamism. The institution facilitates the full resolution of mission needs.
-
Institutional drift. The institution presents binarism of clashing categories for addressing mission needs.
-
Institutional deviation. The institution offers generalizing relief to individuals with persistently unresolved mission needs.
-
Institutional departure. The institution survives by rationalizing system failure, typically by faulting the “broken” individual with unresolved mission needs.
This applies to each mass institutions, each created for a specific set of pubic needs in mass society. Each is covered here briefly. How each institution falls specifically into the function array is a topic for another volume. Perhaps in the expected follow-up to this book tentatively called We Need This, Introducing the applied anankelogy of Need-response. Think of these as a starter for a much larger exploration.
-
Police mission creep. The mission of a police force to protect its citizens from violent individuals becomes militarized to the point of privileging violence against its citizens. Reforming its service to include training for mental health assessment, rules of de-escalated engagement.
-
Judiciary mission creep. The mission of the adversarial judicial process to identify culprits and protect victims gives way to institutional rules to protect its own interests—like conviction finality avoiding acknowledgement of vast number of wrongful convictions.
-
Political mission creep. The mission of political leaders to help sort out prioritizing needs of voters and viewers now gets lost in the nonaccountable influence of the hyper-wealthy donor class.
-
Democracy mission creep. The mission of the ballot box to give input from all citizens to shape policies slides into a passive-aggressive turn-taking every two or more years.
-
Economy mission creep. The purpose of an economy to create and distribute resources we all need slips into a widening gap of unprecedented ownership disparity.
-
Healthcare mission creep. The existence of our modern healthcare structure has long gone astray from the kind of holistic health commitments of our indigenous ancestors.
-
Education mission creep. The foundation of schools to pass along useful knowledge crumbles into moneyed interests supported increasingly by unprecedented student debt.
-
Surveillance mission creep. The creation of the government intelligence apparatus to protect us from foreign threats turns inward to find the enemy lurking within.
-
Journalism mission creep. The mission of mass media to distill reports of central importance to keep the public informed now devolves into clickbait headlines that prioritizes revenue streams for media owners at the expense of a well-informed populace.
When launched with smaller populations, the mission of each mass institution was closer in reach. As larger populations fell under their scope, generalization dependency took over. Fewer needs could actually resolve fully. Symfunctional strain creeps in as the expected norm. Problems are often rationalized as a failure of individuals to follow given rules.
The influence of institutions easily perpetuates this psychosocial reduction when having the power to dodge its own accountability. Those at the top of these institutions tend to be too removed to realize how far astray they are to actual mission outcomes. Each of these mass institutions now tend to be too large and removed from daily situations to effectively resolve the specific needs it is commissioned to serve for thousands and even millions of people.
Neoliberal emphasis on the profit-motive drives much of this institutional mission creep. The likely alternative is a mission creep into some rigid state apparatus similar to the Soviet Union. The former demonstrates psychosocial reduction bias toward placating self-needs. The latter demonstrates psychosocial reduction bias toward placating social-needs.
Anankelogy complements the conventional focus on “bad” individuals with a systems approach, to address all the elements necessary to resolve needs. It applies strategic planning to these mass institutions, which includes critique of mission and vision statements. Need-response as applied anankelogy scales up critique of mass institution’s mission creep. This too is to be covered in more detail in We Need This.
Improving the accountability of mass institutions to its formative purpose can raise the functional level of all involved, including lowering rates of mental health issues and liberating those with such mission needs to reach more of their full potential. Anankelogy links the legitimacy of institutions to its impact on peoples’ needs.
Defunctionalizing
The more you rely on current mass institutions to respect your public needs, the more likely you will be disappointed. The less you engage leading individuals in mass institutions with their identifiable impacts, the harder to hold institutions to account for their commissioned purpose.
The more you react in anger and avoidant fear, the less likely you can find a process to resolve mission needs. The less you exhaust all conciliatory options like love, the less your legitimacy to replace failing institutions with more mission responsive approaches.
Refunctionalizing
The less you rely on current mass institutions to respect your public needs, the less likely you will be disappointed. The more you engage leading individuals in mass institutions with their identifiable impacts, the easier to hold institutions to account for their commissioned purpose.
The more you initially respond with love and grace, the more likely you can lead a process to return to resolving mission needs. The more you exhaust all conciliatory options, the more your legitimacy to replace recalcitrant institutions with more responsive approaches to its mission needs.
48. Illegitimate authority
Illegitimate authority is the imposition of legally or normatively privileged use of force in ways that undercut resolving of needs, or provokes avoidable needs.
Need experience
While no one sits above the law, no law sits above the needs it exists to serve. Laws convey each other’s needs rather impersonally. They tend to be written too vague to address the nuance of every needs. Its vagueness allows it to fit to diverse situations. Laws generalize. In the wrong hands, laws overgeneralize.
We privileging the state with exclusive use of violence (police, courts) to enforce cooperation toward the public good. That may look good on paper. In the wrong hands, it doesn’t look much better than the law of the jungle.
Anankelogy links authority to legitimacy. The privilege to enforce agreed upon rules depends on how well the enforced population can freely and fully resolve their needs. Any authority impeding resolution of needs, or provoking painfully avoidable needs, lacks legitimacy to rule. It must demonstrate better responsiveness to needs or be replaced with those qualified to respond effectively to such needs.
Anankelogic legitimacy is not as subjective as popular notions of legitimacy. It does not depend on democratic notions of what people prefer since needs are objective phenomenon. Anankelogic legitimacy is tied to the objective measures of need outcomes:
-
depression levels,
-
anxiety levels,
-
number of suicide attempts and deaths,
-
number of overdoses,
-
arrests and convictions,
-
domestic abuse complaints,
and the like.
Authority perpetuating psychosocial reduction lacks legitimacy. Rights and responsibilities must balance, with measurable results of greater functioning.
Authority prioritizing institutional needs over mission needs lacks legitimacy. Public needs do not exist for authority, but authority exists for public needs.
Authority favoring one people’s needs over another lacks legitimacy. Especially where favoring institutional needs over the needs the institution is tasked to serve.
Authority without legitimacy is tyranny. This includes any individual or entity attempting to democratically replace or violently overthrow a current illegitimate authority. They assume the same high standard for anankelogic legitimacy. They either counter with need-respecting love or step next in line to lose legitimacy. Competive legitimacy best counters illegitimate authority.
Defunctionalizing
The less the populace can resolve their needs due to authority, the less legitimate the authority posited over them. The more the state’s monopoly of force coerces lower functionality, the less legitimate the state’s government.
Refunctionalizing
The more the populace can resolve their needs due to authority, the more legitimate the authority posited over them. The more the state’s monopoly of force enables higher functionality, the more legitimate the state’s government.
49. Enabled evil
Enabled evil is socially or legally privileged power to adversely impact or destroy others. Specifically in arrogant defiance or evasion of reported complaints.
Need experience
Anankelogic evil is defined as knowingly undermining another’s needs for the sake of relieving the pain of one’s own needs. It typically occurs after a defunction is pointed out, and one insists on their present defunctioning course at the expense of other’s needs. It typically involves a lot of avoidable needs, such as willfully hurting others in rationalized ways.
This is like enabled immaturity on steroids. This tends to sprout from the cesspool of mounting defunctions and various pathologies. This tends to spread like a cancer where lacking effective accountability. This normalizes unresolved needs beyond symfunctional strain, down to misfunctional outcomes. This prioritizes bad over good.
There is no good nor bad except for need. It is anankelogically bad not to realize you are going against what is necessary to resolve needs. It is anankelogically evil to know you are going against resolving needs when you have opportunity to reverse course to address such needs.
While definitely applicable to individuals, this applies to groups and larger entities. It also applies to authorities and whole governments. From the perspective of animal life, all humanity can be seen as enabling evil. It represents the nadir of our functioning potential. Or the complete lack of functioning, inevitably leading to death. Not just for one but for the many, and potentially to all humankind and beyond.
There is no no good nor bad except for need.
Defunctionalizing
The more defunctions become normalized as expected or acceptable behavior, the more they tend to displace refunctions as norms for interacting with each other. The more one’s selfish pain easing overrides others’ need-resolving, the lower everyone’s overall functioning. The less these lower functioning individuals or entities are kept accountable to their adverse impacts, the more likely their defunctions will spread to others.
Refunctionalizing
The less defunctions become normalized as expected or acceptable behavior, the less they tend to displace refunctions as norms for interacting with each other. The less one’s selfish pain easing overrides others’ need-resolving, the lower the threat to spread lowered functioning. The more these lower functioning individuals or entities are kept accountable to their adverse impacts, the less likely their defunctions will spread to others.
50. Anti-anankelogizing
Anti-anankelogizing is deliberate opposition to resolving any needs for any reason. The typical motive is to ease needs or relieve their pain, especially where resources are not reliably accessible.
Need experience
Anankelogizing refers to fully resolving needs. As opposed to partially easing needs, or relieving their pain in ways that allow such pains to fester into problems. Anankelogizing yearns for peakfunctionality.
Resolving needs typically calls for more discipline than conveniently easing them with available but imperfect resources, or easing their pain with generalizing comforts. Resolving needs upends the normalized feelings of symfunctional strain.
Once “addicted” to the norms of symfunctional strain or pain-relieving generalized opposites, anything different seems suspiciously strange and potentially opposed. If one heavily invests meaning in binary opposites, those transcending such polarities to resolve needs can appear as an unacceptable threat.
To avoid the pain of this unfamiliar discipline, they are quick to dismiss the anankelogizer’s conciliatory approach as people-pleasing pacifism. Or as pie-in-the-sky idealism.
If easing the pain of politicized needs depend on taking polarizing positions, the conciliatory path of an anankelogizer to affirm the needs on all sides can seem like more coerced compromise. If easing the pain of endured violence depends on adversarial justice, the conciliatory discipline of an anankelogizer to address all involved needs may appear as soft on crime or anti-victim.
One kind of anankelogizer is the transspirit. That is someone spiritually compelled to connect complementary opposites into a need-resolving whole. Love constrains them to put other’s needs ahead of their own, even if dismissed as a perfectionist, idealist, stary eyed dreamer. Resolving needs propels them beyond divisive conventions. Even when accused as an agitator, deviant, troublemaker, sinner, outcast, scapegoat.
They are compelled to differentiate out the bad and integrate in the good, to resolve needs only eased by generalizations. Even if such generalizations are highly valued as sacrosanct by the majority of us. The liberty to resolve needs does not permit them to indulge in such overgeneralized opposites. Even if their discipline is widely mischaracterized as indulgence.
Let me tell you about one such transspirit. About a person feeling compelled to transcend divisive gender norms. Who came out as transgender decades ago, but was instantly misinterpreted as a sexual deviant without evidence.
This person could empathize with their political generalizing against transgender people. Without denouncing them as transphobic. This transspirit could understood their sense of family and community relied on traditional gender norms. This transspirit respected their regard of sacred family traditions. This repeatedly accosted transspirit absorbed their animosity without returning it.
Neighbors indoctrinated their children with anti-transgender beliefs. One child was coached to accuse this gender-transcendent transspirit as a sex offender. Without evidence, this transspirit was convicted. Still this transspirit prioritized the needs of others.
When insisting innocence, others presumed this transspirit to be in denial, as if avoiding responsibility. They could not relate to the higher level of responsibility this transspirit already reached. They could not see they were rejecting the cornerstone holding up the conciliatory process of need-resolving.
They remained blinded by their familiarity bias and relief bias. While believing they were doing good by sending this innocent person to prison, they applauded themselves for squashing anankelogizing they could not understand. Forgive them, since they do not know what they do.
I do forgive them. I am that transspirit. I am that one spiritually compelled to resolve needs against incredible odds. I am that transspirit granted wisdom, grace and love to go through all this for you. I am that transspirit to be removed enough from the ways of this world to be able to look back in with an impartial eye.
There are many transspiritual anankelogizers like me. Who are spiritually compelled to transcend divisive conventions to connect complementary sides to resolve stubborn needs. Who endure the indignities of accusations, insults, assaults and imprisonment. Yet they transcend all this to shine as inspiring leaders who resolve needs against conventional odds.
I think of Jesus, St. Paul, Gandhi, Bonhoeffer, MLK, Mandela. I count myself in good company. The love that prioritizes resolution of needs persist more powerful than any anti-anankelogizing resistance. Even if requiring one transspiritually committed life at a time.
Defunctionalizing
The more a transspirit is resisted, the less one can personally benefit from that person’s loving commitment to resolve all needs.
Refunctionalizing
The more a transspirit is resisted, the more love finds a way to transcend barriers to resolve suppressed needs.
Accountable relational knowing
Relational knowing is to be kept accountable by applied anankelogy. Which in turn is to be kept accountable by academic anankelogy. To illustrate, let’s start with a basic relational knowing statement. Then run it up the ladder, per se, to keep what we know in check with knowable reality.
Accessible anankelogy
Defunctionalizing
The less you can expose your deepest secrets with another who responds positively to your emotional intimacy, the more guarded you will feel when vulnerable towards others.
Refunctionalizing
The more you can expose your deepest secrets with another who responds positively to your emotional intimacy, the safer you will feel when vulnerable towards others.
Applied anankelogy
Defunctionalizing
The less you can expose your fear of being exploited by your employer, the more likely your employer will exact concessions from you that you will come to detest.
The less aware your employer to their coercive effect on you, the less productivity they will gain from your workplace contributions.
Refunctionalizing
The more you can expose your fear of being exploited by your employer, the less likely your employer will exact concessions from you that you would come to detest.
The more aware your employer to their coercive effect on you, the more productivity they can gain from your workplace contributions.
Academic anankelogy
Defunctionalizing
The less an employee trusts their employer to not exploit their vulnerabilities, the more prone to resentment, depression and lowered workplace productivity.
Refunctionalizing
The more an employee trusts their employer to not exploit their vulnerabilities, the less prone to resentment, depression and lowered workplace productivity.
Test design
Resentment and depression can be measured by a self-reporting survey, corroborated by independent observations. Productivity can be measured independently.
A controlled experiment can compare those reporting feeling exploited by the employer and those not reporting employer exploitation. This can check findings in the clinical setting.
Correlation can be tested for statistic significance between vulnerabilities for exploitation, productivity levels, and incidence and prevalence of depression. If a statistically significant correlation is found, employers may decide to implement checks on how their influence undermines their productivity aims.
The experiment can be replicated in a different setting to validate or invalidate the initial findings. To check for confirmation bias beyond the null hypothesis, academic anankelogy offers a “contra-hypothesis” by suggesting a completely opposite relation that could be tested. For example, the more an employer pressures its employees in ways deemed exploitive, the higher their productive output without externalities like depression.
Anankelogists supporting anankelogizers
Academic anakelogy includes “anankelogists” outside of the need situation. Tools of social science focus on the phenomenon of need itself. Findings can then filter back to clinicians in the field of applied anankelogy. Which in turn keeps accessible anankelogy accountable to need-resolving aims.
How this all works in detail is the subject for another book. The point here is relational knowing statements can be kept accountable by the full field of anankelogy, supporting one another to resolve needs and know need are being resolved.
Anankelogizer refers to anyone resolving needs. Not merely easing needs or softening its pain. But only to those who fully resolve needs. A baby smiling in response to their mother is informally anankelogizing the mother’s need for love and meaningfulness, and more. Formal or proactive anankelogy actively counters defunctions to resolve underserved needs. A list of refunctions follow to set the bar for such proactive anankelogizers.
In the tradition of my Haudenosaunee ancestors, I do not “sell” this inspired creation of anankelogy as individually owned intellectual property but offer it free to all. Once I put it all out there, according to indigenous principles, it no longer belongs to me. It belongs to us all.
I do accept donations. I do not require a lot of cash; my bill collectors do. This is how a latter-day Native like myself can balance both worlds. Thank you.
"THANK YOU FOR PROVIDING THIS ANANKELOGY INFORMATION FOR FREE
No information collected, just click to send $1.
If you are ready, willing and able to contribute more, then who am I to stop you?
Go ahead and click here to express more of your gratitude. And to offer any testimonial of what this means to you.
Thank you for thanking me serving your needs.
with this $1 gift. Thank you."