Value Relating

Most political debating wastes your precious time, and theirs. You could be connecting with just about everyone across the political spectrum, instead of repelling them with your “reasoned” rhetoric. Debating does little to understand each other’s differences.

 

You want to get a jump on understanding political differences? Then leave the political arguments behind. Start with how you and your constituents experience needs differently. Start here.

 

It’s about needs

 

Any discussion about political differences that fails to start with differently experienced needs can quickly fall off track.

• Chosen opinions? Not really.

• Persuaded to agree? You wish.

• Connecting with diversely felt needs? Bulls-eye!

 

Politics begins with needs. Your needs. Their needs. Wherever needs are felt the same, and wherever experienced quite differently.

• Not from ideologies. Those emerge later.

• Not opposing positions. Those are reactions.

• Not even about differing beliefs.

All those emerge after the fact of each other’s differing experience of needs.

 

Needs come first. Your needs. Their needs. How one another experience such needs differently fuel one another’s political arguments. Some of your needs repeatedly clash with their needs, sparking political conflict. Painful needs, when left unresolved.

 

Politics exist to serve needs

 

Apart from differing needs, there can be no politics. When you need something that negatively affects others, or when they need something that negatively affects you, we run to the generalizing of politics to furiously sort it out. And we sure hope it works.

 

It’s about experiencing deep satisfaction, when your needs get fully resolved. Or mere relief, when at least easing the pressures. Or mounting discomfort when your neglected needs persist.

 

Good politics resolves needs, cancelling the pain reporting those needs. Mediocre politics merely relieves the pain, while leaving the source of the pain in place to reemerge later.

 

Too often, politics misses the mark for fully resolving each other’s persisting needs. You can find the bulk of your political differences around unresolved needs.

 

Especially those patched over with efforts to merely relieve some pain, without getting to the underlying needs themselves. Let’s be honest. Both sides use political arguing to placate your pain, without ever knowing your exact needs.

 

Neither political side can claim a monopoly here. Both get sucked into merely relieving pain. As if that’s the best we can do.

 

Win-win empowerment

 

Let’s not blame the other side anymore. Let’s put that old win-lose mindset to rest. Let’s replace it with a win-win approach that finally addresses everyone’s underlying needs.

 

Fortunately, you now have access to tools for better understanding each other’s needs. These tools are brought to you by the new academic field of anakelogy, the study of need. Anakelogy is our secret sauce, empowering us (and now you) to understand “need.”

 

At its core, anakelogy understands need as the rising and falling of some functional level. Such a need can be empirically measured indirectly using such social science tools as standardized surveys, a working hypothesis, a null hypothesis to mitigate confirmation bias, and statistical analysis.

 

Politics may seem arbitrary, but can now be put under the microscope of anakelogical critique. For starters, this anakelogical approach debunks conventional wisdom that one political side is better than the other. Specific needs in one another’s lives emerge too nuanced for that.

 

By respecting the needs on all sides, you can now replace your old win-lose orientation with an empowering win-win vision. Our shrinking world leaves little room for the win-lose politics of old. Welcome to the future of politicking, where everyone’s needs finds a home.

 

Your future is now.