"Where did you come up with the name Satisologie?"
S writes in with the germane and pertinent query.
S writes: “What a great mix of topics for a newsletter! Where did you come up with the name Satisologie? Couldn't find that defined anywhere and wasn't quite sure how to break down the word into its etymological parts!”
Dearest S,
Satisologie was a tricky one to come up with! It came to me one day while staring out over the empty plains and Denver in the distance, and I had to write it down. It's essentially a Superset of Economics (where economics is one of the four quadrants) and I thought, you know, this is really more about satisfaction of need instead of just the need itself. Need is already a given, being a human with body, so we can assume "need" and focus on "satisfaction" of the need, which is where it comes from
Satis + ology:
The study of satisfaction (of primal needs).
"Primal" typically means base, vulgar, carnal, but in Satisologie "primal" alludes to the primacy of:
Needing to feel fulfilled,
Happy,
Spiritually at ease,
Able to rest on the laurels of one's conduct and contribution, and
The primacy of creativity and its impetus to be expressed in the universe as wholly and untrimmed as possible.
It's about the negotiation of values in order to resolve "satisfaction flows." So in a simple way, anything that has a "satisfaction flow" is something I'm interested in studying.
I was reading "The Order of Things," a tall-named can of milk from Michel Foucault that shows a lot of interesting overlaps between biology, philosophy, linguistics, and economy, and I took some of his nebulous trails to ever farther-reaching conclusions.
Foucault mentions that true creativity is from divinity and the earth, and the creator mingles spirits with divinity in the act of creation. I think this is, for lack of better words to describe what's going on, true. I thought a lot about where things come from, where does value really come from, and it's created by the earth/nature (branch) or by human creativity (brain).
There's an underlying system of satisfaction flows that waits to be uncovered.
In a way, I'm trying to show that economics is based largely on beliefs and the local awareness, or local knowledge of any participating entity. Since beliefs are subject to change, what should we aim for? In general, we should be satisfying the most primal needs, those of greatest priority and deepest import.
Another thing I really enjoy about this breakdown is that it elevates the human condition to the focal point, around which to build economy, not the other way around.
