ANANKELOGY 101
Your Needs Exist as Objective Facts
Anankelogy distinguishes between objective needs and how they’re subjectively experienced.
Distinguishing between actual needs and rhetorical needs
Distinguishing between inflexible needs and flexible options
Distinguishing between natural needs and constructed actions
Distinguishing between unchosen needs and chosen responses
Distinguishing between needs and preferences
Discipline of descriptive over normative
Your objectively existing needs, and theirs
Replacing hostilities with shared respect, even for repulsive elites
Love is the answer
Melting isolation with love
They’re manipulating you. After manipulating themselves, institutional elites persuade you and I to accept the widely held myth that your needs are subjective. They’re not! These elites benefit from pulling you and I down this rabbit hole of relativizing our absolute needs.
You feel lonely? According to them, you must’ve done something to push others away. Feeling upset? Probably from some false expectation. Longing to be warmly embraced? Likely because you can’t decide to make it on your own. You don’t want forever wars? Their fearmongering messaging must pivot to exaggerate some new threat.
Anankelogy recognizes how you feel lonely after objectively requiring some social connection. You never choose to require social connection. Any more than you choose to require water, or choose to require to live in peace. And the more you ignore your unchosen needs, the less you can function. The less you function, the more you suffer pain.
Not everything you call a need is actually a need. Let’s distinguish between the objective facts of actual needs and subjective ways we popularly refer to them. Let’s clear up the confusion so we can resist exploitations from manipulative elites.
Distinguishing between actual needs and rhetorical needs
If I tell you I need a bottle of water, I actually don’t. I naturally require water, but the container in which I get it is unnatural. It’s optional. I could get it in a cup, or cup my hands under the faucet.
Only water can restore my body’s need for fluid, and temperature, equilibrium. So my need and your need for water exists as an objective fact. I may say I need a bottle, but that’s best understood as a “rhetorical need”. Such rhetorical needs express how we prefer an actual need to be addressed. Not the actual need itself.
Distinguishing between inflexible needs and flexible options
I can say that I need a map. But I can find my route in other ways. If some other flexible way can serve my actual need for direction, then I don’t literally need a map. I’m just saying that I prefer a map than other flexible options.
Anankelogy recognizes your actual needs as inflexible needs. No other option exists to satisfy it. Water and traveling direction are inflexible needs. A bottle and a map exist as flexible options.
Distinguishing between natural needs and constructed actions
I can message you and say I need your email address. But I don’t actually need your email address to contact you. Of course, I much prefer to email you than send you a letter if I need you to get the message in minutes.
It’s often easier to convey my natural needs — like a need to contact another — by including the constructed action that could best satisfy that need. But we risk conflating what we can change (sharing an email address) with what we cannot change (interpersonal connection).
Distinguishing between unchosen needs and chosen responses
I can choose to characterize as an indisputable need that I must now go home. But I cannot choose to not require shelter. It’s just easier to insist where I seek shelter than bore you with the obvious.
The more I substitute a chosen response for my unchosen requirement, the more I stray into thinking my only option is going home. Or getting your email address. Or reaching for a bottle. I risk assuming I can’t change what I can, while wrongly assuming you can somehow choose a need that you cannot.
Distinguishing between needs and preferences
I need a car that’s trip worthy so I can visit family a couple states away. Honestly, I could get there by bus. I simply prefer to get there without sharing a seat. Saying I need a car fills in my preferred way to travel.
We frequently convey to others how we prefer they respond to our actual needs by citing such rhetorical needs. There is some safe room for change if they refuse. We generally prefer to avoid the uncomfortable vulnerability of openly expressing an actual need that we cannot change.
Discipline of descriptive over normative
Anankelogy instills the discipline to distinguish between the objective and subjective dimensions of our experienced needs. Anankelogy recognizes that you objectively require something to continue functioning.
You objectively must function, independent of your subjective experience of it. You objectively require something so you can continue functioning, independent of your experience of it. If you don’t “feel” like breathing, you will suffocate. Your feelings have little to do with the originating needs themselves.
You must now do something to get what’s required. And that’s where your experience of needs slides into a subjective realm. But even then, your perception, beliefs and actions to address those necessities don’t have to be dismissed as irrational. Just open to greater reflection, which anankelogy now provides in greater detail than any other option.
Equipped with this distinction between needs and preferences, anankelogy enables you to more carefully describe what your life requires. You can hold at bay your emotionally charged preferences. You can aptly apply the social science discipline of being descriptive of what is actually there, over the normative of what you may prefer to find.
Your objectively existing needs, and theirs
Just think what this discipline can bring to our many contemporary problems.
- We cease provoking our “enemies” into desperate situations that spark backlash we dismiss as terrorism.
- We empathize with the unchosen needs affecting all involved in a conflict.
- We draw attention to what can be changed instead of bogging down on things we cannot.
- We stop demonizing the other political side to finally appreciate their needs that no debate can alter.
- We dissolve petty hostilities to cultivate greater understanding and respect for each other’s needs.
If you cannot change your inflexible need for self-determination, then why expect others to change their need for self-determination? If you cannot compromise your need for security, why provoke another’s inflexible need for security by vainly indulging your own preferred ways to remain secure?
Replacing hostilities with shared respect, even for repulsive elites
Let’s be honest. U.S. military power easily infects elites with arrogance. Remember how pride comes before the fall. We’re observing in real time the elite establishment falling to pieces. They don’t seem to appreciate the traps they’ve set for themselves, and for us all. The more it clings to its coercive power, the greater the fall.
Look beyond the veneer of the Hamas-Israel conflict, and peer beyond mere appearances of the Russia-Ukraine war. Observe how the U.S. military industrial complex emboldens the Israeli war cabinet and the Ukrainian government. Bolstered with U.S. arsenal, elites blindly ignore the other side’s inflexible needs for security and self-determination that cannot be changed.
These elites know their influence on legacy media can provoke fear. They know how to cultivate widespread support for war by simply ignoring the “enemy’s” inflexible needs. The more they trigger obvious pushback for what cannot be changed, the more the military industrial complex wins. They boldly secure their economic self-determination at the cost of others. They don’t personally fight the wars that cost precious lives, we do. And “we the people” eventually lose.
Love is the answer
But that’s no reason to hate such elites. While their conflation of needs with preferences risks dragging us all into a wider war, room exists to turn this all around. With the power of love — of honoring the needs of others as we would have them honor our own. Instead of ringing alarms for an anti-elite stance, I’m actually reaching out to affirm their inflexible needs. Along the way, I offer them a better way to outshine their peers.
Instead of sinking down to their level of mutually defensive opposition, I invite institutional leaders of every stripe to affirm the needs they can never change. Instead of echoing their adversarialist norms, I model to them the mutual respect we all need for our futures. Anankelogy can help improve their legitimacy by showing them how to effectively support our actual needs. They must faithfully respect our inflexible needs, or we must delegitimize them. Call it tough love.
Melting isolation with love
Along the way, this need-responsive respect can bring elites back into the fold of humanity, with humility. With the power of love — or honoring the inflexible needs of others as we would have them honor our own inflexible needs — we reverse the contemporary slide into utter despair.
Let’s be clear, this is a work of love. Realizing no one can change what they inflexibly need invites greater empathy. Builds more trust. Incentivizes more kindness. Engenders more patience. Cultivates more resilience, and much more.
Because we inflexibly need each other in ways most of us painfully neglect. As @Jeremy Raymondjack aptly put it: we are each other’s future.
Thank you for reading, and for clapping. Your feedback is invited in the comments:
Debunk this notion of objective needs. Can you think of any exceptions?
If your needs exist as objective facts, what could that imply to you?
This is the second in a series introducing you to anankelogy. I look forward to engaging anyone who appreciates this vision for improving our lives by better understanding our needs.