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Need Response

NEED

RESPONSE

Need-response is an envisioned new professional field applying the social science of anankelogy.
It aims to complement or compete with law enforcement for positive results in our lives.

Need-response is applied anankelogy. Need-response applies anankelogy to your needs.

Need-response is anankelogy’s answer to divisive institutions, like the adversarial judiciary, law enforcement, and polarizing politics. Those institutions create needless power relations that hinder the resolution of your needs, leaves you in pain, and hinders what you can fully do.

 

Need-response builds upon these basic anankelogic assumptions.

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YOUR NEEDS

YOUR
NEEDS

Functionality array priorities

Peakfunctionality – prioritizing need resolving

Symfunctionality – prioritizing need relieving

Dysfunctionality – prioritizing pain relieving

Misfunctionality – prioritizing survival

Functionality array priorities - PO

Peakfunctional psychosocial orientation: prioritizing resolution of self-needs and social-needs equally; to sustain psychosocial equilibrium and wu wei flow.

Symfunctional psychosocial orientation: prioritizing relief of social-needs while guarding affected self-needs if wide-oriented; prioritizing relief of self-needs while guarding affected social-needs if deep-oriented; to improve psychosocial balance.

Dysfunctional psychosocial orientation: prioritizing relief of painful social-needs while guarding painfully affected self-needs if wide-oriented; prioritizing relief of painful self-needs while guarding painfully affected social-needs if deep-oriented; to avoid furthering the pain of psychosocial imbalance.

Misfunctional psychosocial orientation: prioritizing survival by vacillating to extreme indulgence of social-need (“pretend normal”) and then indulgence of extreme opposite self-need (“act out”); prioritizing relief of painful self-needs while guarding painfully affected social-needs if deep-oriented; continually struggling with psychosocial imbalance.

Full functionality array

 

apex peakfunctionality: promptly resolving needs to optimize own life in ways optimizing the resolving of other’s needs for them to live optimally; love.

mid peakfunctionality: promptly resolving needs to optimize own life in ways potentially positively impactful upon the needs of others.

least peakfunctionality: promptly resolving needs to optimize own life in ways not negatively impactful upon the needs of others.

 

threshold symfunctionality: arbitrary actions done humanly together that contribute to easing human needs without hindering other human needs; e.g., driving on the right side of the road in the U.S.

mid symfunctionality: arbitrary actions done humanly together that contribute to easing human needs with some hindrance to other human needs; e.g., ordering a subordinate to serve a customer.

worst symfunctionality: arbitrary actions done humanly together that contribute to easing human needs mostly by stalling resolution of such needs; e.g., systemic exaction. Gateway to dysfunctionality.

 

threshold dysfunctionality: unresolved needs start prioritizing relief that risks impeding resolution of such needs, or limiting resolution of other needs.

mid dysfunctionality: unresolved needs prioritizes pain relief indefinitely over resolving one’s own needs, while maintaining no significant negative impact on the needs of others.

worst dysfunctionality: unresolved needs prioritizes pain relief over resolving anyone’s needs, resulting in significant negative impacts on the needs of others.

 

threshold misfunctionality: unresolved needs results in temporary damage of oneself, with likely negative impacts on others.

mid misfunctionality: unresolved needs results in permanent damage.

worst misfunctionality: unresolved needs results in death.

Speaking your Truth of Impacted Needs to Power

ASSESS their awareness of your identify needs

First, just quietly tell ‘em what you need.

Assessments let you replace dysfunctional "unchecked believing" with "relational knowing."

Unchecked believing accepts the given conventional understanding about something, without checking if accurate or not, or if what was true yesterday remains true for today.

Relational knowing replaces unchecked believing by continually engaging sources of information to gather as accurate a picture as possible, to make well informed decisions, and to see if what was known yesterday remains the case even for today.

 

You assess if they conventionally overlook your needs.

 

As we build this out, you will find more assessment examples here.

Extortion vs. “contra-extortion”

When speaking your truth to power with avowed consequence you may well wonder, “Isn’t that extortion?” Consider your alternative.

 

Do you continue to allow more powerful others, in the name of legal compliance when they can afford better legal representation than you, to pull you further into debilitating anxiety and depression? Or isn’t that a form of privileged extortion? Besides, this doesn't fit the legal definition of extortion.

Extortion

Most states define extortion as the gaining of property or money by almost any kind of force, or threat of

1) violence,

2) property damage,

3) harm to reputation, or

4) unfavorable government action.

Does that really apply here?

 

In contrast to the explicit crime of extortion, consider how in your situation

  1. there is already a working relationship between the parties,

  2. the working relationship involves a power imbalance,

  3. there is already a level of coercion in the other direction, and

  4. your “demand” is for a preferred conciliatory approach to responsibly resolve all affected needs.

Actual extortion includes none of these.

 

Legitimacy at stake

Conflating this proactive approach with an adversarial accusation of extortion (or extraction) invites and potentially triggers a rapid shift along these option arrays. It invites impeachment of legitimacy, of the very privilege accorded to the more powerful to have any role in your needs.

 

While no one sits above the law, no law sits above the needs it exists to serve. By following this proactive prosocial path, you serve their need to improve their legitimacy. Whether that’s the need of government to demonstrate good stewardship with democratic principles, or the need of private enterprise struggling to earn the trust of its constituents. Helping us resolve our needs earns that respect.

 

Contra-extortion

This process instills responsibility on all sides. Coercion in any direction undermines the responsible resolution of affected needs. If needed, we are open to discuss how this remains distinct from extortion.

 

We are not open to this status quo of power differentials and calling it conciliatory. It’s adversarial, and unacceptable to the natural path of resolving needs.

 

To overlook this openness for mutual understanding, with a rush to apply privileged accusation, provides us more evidence of privileged extortion—or what we call “contra-extraction.”

 

Contra-extortion is where the avoidance of being accused of extortion allows the more influential in a power imbalance to subtly “extract” or “extort” compliance to their coercive advantage. To be sure, this is a type of psychosociopathology, where needs are not being responsibly resolved.

 

Accountability

Accountability sets in when removal of contra-extraction correlates significantly with a measurable decrease in anxiety and depression. To reassert norms of coercive influence then appears to argue for more debilitating anxiety and depression. Which warrants a challenge to the legitimacy of such authority.

 

These options raise the bar on accountability for all sides, to remain responsive to how we affect one another’s needs. Relieving pain at another’s expense—no matter what the authority—lacks the legitimacy compared to removing pain by respectfully responding to all affected needs. Period.

 

In the honorable tradition of Thoreau and Gandhi and King and the many like them unheard, we prioritize personal resolving of needs over the privileged extortion of exploitive impersonal law. We avow to resolve needs, by any means of nature necessary. Nature permits us to do no less.

 

Conciliatory ethics

To be fully ethical, in line with how we naturally function, we must allow room for each side to respond appropriately to each side’s identified, expressed and addressed needs. Three levels of ethics seek to do just that.

 

gap ethics – assessing the apparent gaps in whatever ethics are being applied

grassroots ethics – auditing the actual impacts from whatever ethics applied

guerilla ethics – avowing to address needs despite whatever ethics applied

Judicial independence

Anakelogical jurisprudence

While no one sits above the law, no law sits above the needs it exists to serve. And no one has authority over need. No one can order you on the spot to experience your need in any other way than how you experience it right now.

Need response serves as an impartial observer, staying within the social science discipline of description—distinct from the normalizing emphasis in the judiciary, or in politics. 

Need response provides empirical data to point us all to the ultimate authority of resolved needs, essential for personal and societal functioning. 

Response to Pain focal range 4x6.png

While no one sits above the law, no law sits above the needs it exists to serve.

[contra-extortion]

Confronting damaging power relations

avoidance options then adversarial options

sanitized pathology of flight-fight-or-freeze

poor mental health outcomes linked mostly or exclusively to coercive power relations

address any informal power relations after impeaching formal power relations, to remove cause for any risk or ongoing occurrences of displacement

mutually resolve needs,

removing pain, and

advocacy campaign.

POWER REACTION vs. NEED RESPONSE

ORIGIN OF STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS

Mass institution

Emerges to impersonally serve a large-scale need

Authority set by impersonal law

Creates avoidance-adversarial options imposed on subjects

Rely on arguments

Self-serving rationalizations

Win-lose approach

Selfish focus on own needs

Empowered love

Large-scale needs addressed with mutual connection

Authority in resolved needs

Grows from conciliatory process to resolve each other’s needs

Empirically based in need outcomes

Measurable need outcomes

Win-win approach

Love encouraged

DRIFT FROM TAKING CONVENTIONAL SIDES

Binary oppositional

Overemphasize differences

Prematurely oppositional

Dismissive of complaints

Generalized opposites

Uninformed decisions on needs, based on generalized beliefs​​

Contra-oppositional

Risks producing more of what it ostensibly opposes

Complementary sides

Recognize all impacted needs

Start on common ground

Address all relevant needs

Specifics integrated

Informed decisions on needs, grounded in subjects’ data

Balancing needs

Extract each other’s selfish wants to resolve needs

IMPACT ON NEEDS

Relieve pain

Dulls pain that persists

Maladies reinforced

Anxiety, depression, addictions reinforced

Hinder functioning

Leaders function for subjects

Power relations dominate

Subject needs minimized

Resolve needs

Removes cause for pain

Maladies cleared up

Anxiety, depression, addictions cleared up

Raise functioning

Improve overall functioning

Power relations checked

Leaders’ needs impeached

LARGE SCALE RESULTS

State imposes order

Top-down answers

Legitimacy questioned

Symfunctionality or worse 

Personal & societal decline

Psychosocial damage

Natural growth flourishes

Bottom-up wisdom

Subject needs prioritized

Large scale needs served whether needs of institution are served adequately or not

Competitive legitimacy
Personal & societal ascent

Psychosocial wellness

power reaction v need response
- - gap ethics
- - grassroots ethics
- - guerilla ethics
- - identify need; DEGENERALIZE
- - express need; DEALIENATE
YOUR OPTIONS

YOUR
OPTIONS

- - address need; DEPOLARIZE
- your avoidance options

Most anxiety and depression results from your situation. Let's not be fooled by psychosocial reduction. It's time to address your situation. Let's consider your options.

- your adversarial options
- your conciliatory options
psychosocial reduction =

Reducing to either biopsychological factors excluding socioenvironmental factors or reducing to socioenvironmental factors excluding biopsychological factors. Wellness relies on a balance of both.

psychosocial reduction?
- standardize
- legitimize
- authorize
YOUR RESPONSE

YOUR
RESPONSE

"Need Response" uses anakelogy to hold other institutions accountable to positive outcomes. 

- assess
- audit
- avow
Assertive nonviolence

If you ever find yourself this deep into the process with irresponsible Impactors, your choice of support team members become vital. Your internally built resiliency may not provide you enough fortitude. Feedback from your team 

Passive nonviolence is simply violence by another name. Instead of directed outward, it's directed inward against yourself. The more violence you endure beyond your overtaxed resilience, the less capable you likely are to respond properly to the needs of others. Long before lashing out in word or deed, less visible reactions emerge. Others can no longer rely on you, as your guard get repeatedly raised. 

Majority vote by your support team

Consensus of your support team

 - passive consensus: state your intended action to your support team and as long as none of your supporters object, you can assume consensus by default to move forward with your stated intent.

 - active consensus: invite your team's feedback to your decision and only if a majority actively voice support with no one objecting, do you move forward.

 - proactive consensus: require each support team member to state their position on your decision and what they are likely to do with each possible consequence to your decision, and only if all support your decision in the face of the most threatening consequences do you move forward.

If your safety or the safety of others are on the line, we recommend active consensus. 

Decisive self-defense

Personally, if I must risk dying for the deeper meaning of responsibly resolving each other's needs, then I embrace those risks. If necessary, I look forward to dying a glorious death. And leaving a proud legacy for my progeny. If called to lay down my life for a cause much greater than myself, consider it already done.

Pain can be no deterrent after enduring the decades of this wrongful conviction, sexual harassment, of marginalization,  

Remember, pain is not my enemy. Unresolved needs reported by pain are my foes. As Dr. King and others have pointed out, redemptive suffering is laudable. 

Proactive offense

Even Dr. King recognized the role of the state's exclusive authority, to proactively use its privileged use of violence to compel compliance to the Civil Rights act of 1964. 

civilrights.jpg
Seek not to contend

Respect for needs dissolve

almost any mounting tension.

 

Though differing how to solve,

you prioritize no dissension. 

 

Peace comes as you boldly involve

their need resolving intention

Because where all needs resolve

there can be no contention.

Transcendent Morality

There is no good nor bad except for needs. Morality is code for needs.

 

There is no greater authority than resolved needs. A law enabling to resolve some need is more legit than a law merely providing relief from unmet needs in ways that perpetuate such painful needs.

- - assertive nonviolence

- Buckminster Fuller

- - decisive self-defense

When you're forced to choose
between options of insufferable pain,

then you've got little left to lose,
and potentially everything to gain.

Turning problems into opportunities for value

 

Value to RI: improved responsiveness to their overlooked specific needs.

 

The more ___

Value to AI: accountability for their actual value being produced.

 

The more ___

Value to society: systemic removal of entities threatening social cohesion.

 

The more ___

SUMMARY
- - proactive offense
options array arrows.png
options array arrows.png
options array arrows.png

If and when committed to push forward, to raise the bar on resolving needs in the face of any influential resistance, let's commit to a thoroughly proactive path. 

WORK IN PROGRESS

 
You’re seeing a work in progress.

 

Yes, I know, some content on this page is missing.

Much of this material will inevitably be changed as we go to market. 

You're the market. You can help us create value with your constructive feedback.

 

Thank you for helping us create this meaningful service.

notepad-411030_1280.jpg
You’re seeing a work in progress.

 

OVERLOOKED PROBLEM

 

Here’s the basic problem: Scholarly estimates put the number of wrongly convicted

far beyond the current available resources to exonerate them. The criminal justice

courts remain slow to correct their errors, or to even admit to these egregious errors.

 

The National Registry of Exonerations has yet to hit 3000. There are at least 20,000 wrongly

convicted Americans, according to a more conservative estimate. Higher estimates climb into

the millions. Even one is one too many.

 

I am one of those. I was falsely accused and wrongly convicted back in 1993. I appealed my case, but

only received partial relief. Unacceptable. I requested help from the Innocence Project, but told they prioritize their meager resources helping those in greater jeopardy. Unacceptable.

 

I’ve tried getting on with my life, but remain subject to legalized discrimination. I can no longer wait for

the innocence projects, journalists, or others. If you too are wrongly convicted, what do you do?

 

OFFERED SOLUTION

It’s time to take matters in our own hands, in a prosocial and productive way.

 

It’s time to declare our innocence, and compel

Now you're all in. You're committed to Need Response. You've declared yourself committed to resolve needs, over conventional divides that can only offer temporary pain relief, but leave us locked into a painfully unresolved status quo.

So now you avow to set your own terms of service, to standardize how others treat you. You avow to legitimize resolving needs over simply relieving their pain. You authorize respect for needs beyond conventional authority. Now you dive deep into life, letting life dive deep into you.

Standardize
 
Set the bar high for how others treat you.

 

Up to this point, you’ve repeatedly agreed to other’s “terms of service.” You even had to agree to our terms, right?

 

Such terms typically are offered give-or-take. One-size-fits-all. Take-it-or-leave-it.

 

From now on: leave it.

 

From this point forward, you set the terms for influential others contracting with you. They’re your needs, dammit. Only you can set the final terms for how they are meaningfully respected, and ultimately resolved.

 

We provide a template for you to build upon. We optimize your terms by syncing them with a tightknit support network, with shared values. Together, we form a bundle of arrows not easily broken.

 

Up until now, you’ve had to acquiesce to terms built more for relieving general pain than for resolving specific needs. Once you’ve tasted deeply meaningful resolution of needs, clarly removing its pain, how can you ever go back to their lower standards?

 

As your life demonstrates the implicitly higher authority of resolved needs, correlating with greater individual and shared functionality, you can join us in boldly telling

them: 

 

"You need not tell us what we must do

or what policy or law we must follow.

We'll tell you."

 

Yes, we dare them to resolve needs as we resolve needs. We base such audacity on our measurable wellness outcomes, and verified improved functionality.

 

When you’re more afraid of mounting continual pain from unresolved needs than the brief sharp pain of the unknown when speaking truth to power, you’ve made a foundational breakthrough.

 

When you can face the pain of that threat with supportive others, the fear and pain naturally subside. When you create something meaningful for others, whatever discomfort you must endure naturally shrinks in comparison.

 

You find it liberating when you connect your existence to the meaningful resolution of needs in others. You come alive. You live like you perhaps have never lived before.

 

Once you avow to live life so deeply, those at the shallow end of the pool may scoff. We defy their likely adversarial reaction with the very need responsiveness others need from them. We model the legitimacy they need.

Legitimize
 
Help impactors respond to need.

If impactors responded sufficiently to your needs, you probably would not be here, reading this. But the fact impactors

(like employers, bill collectors,

police detectives, prosecutors,

politicians, policymakers)

disappoint your deepest needs says something about their room for improvement.

 

They likely defer to what they know best: rules for you to follow. As if every rule can be trusted to serve every need. As if you and I existed to serve their laws.

 

But we do not exist to serve their laws. Especially not as they interpret them without our input. Either our needs receive respect by the enforced laws, or law enforcement lacks full legitimacy.

 

If we're already resolving needs while openly engaging other relevant needs, cited laws may appear illegitimately self-serving. Needs do not exist to serve laws, but laws exist to serve needs.

 

As sure as we cannot make gravity go up if ordered to do so, we cannot revert to normative alienation, to coercive power differentials, to culprits of stifling anxiety and debilitating depression.

 

This is not some political generalized challenge to hierarchies, to patriarchy, or to "the system." Where those ideological challenges offer relief from unbearable pressures, they are welcomed as provisional relief.

 

Where they are championed over resolving all affected needs, they easily become part of the problem. Guiding ideas and laws do not govern our needs; nature governs our needs.

 

As sure as "conversion therapy" cannot overrule nature of one’s ingrained orientation, no attempt will succeed to overrule our natural prioritization of needs over asserted law. Any cited law receives no free pass.

 

Any citation of law shall be followed by 1) the needs it’s supposed to serve, and 2) how they will know how it actually impacts needs. Otherwise their legitimacy may be questioned. Their funding may be challenged. Their trustworthiness tested against the higher authority of resolved needs.

 

From our anakelogical angle, legitimacy is earned by how responsive they are to the needs they impact.

 

We model the legitimacy they need. When we are more need-responsive than they, we can help them respond better to needs. We can help them build legitimacy in their privileged authority. In the end, it’s all about spreading value for all needs to be more freely resolved.

Authorize
 
Affirm impactors responding to need .

 

Devotion to a conciliatory path inevitably results in more and more needs fully resolving. This naturally will compete with conventional authorities aimed more at relieving pain of unresolved needs.

 

By “authorizing” others (notably impactors) to engage with us on any impactful level, we set the bar for a more meaningful authority, of greater legitimacy, with accountability to resolving needs for removing pain.

 

For clarity, consider these anakelogically-based definitions for these terms:

Accountability = the consequence you face when you wrongly impact others.

Legitimacy = level of responsiveness to needs under your care.

Authority = ascribed role to ensure adherence to agreed upon standards for respecting needs.

 

Legitimacy with weak accountability is fragile.

Legitimacy without accountability is really no legitimacy at all.

Authority with weak legitimacy is morally questionable.

Authority without legitimacy is tyranny.

 

In a sense, we democratize what we authorize. We shift focus away from impersonal laws aimed more at relieving pain—with its many generalizations—and toward personally engaging each other’s needs in more meaningful ways.

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