Maslow’s Hierarchy is the idea that people have a bunch of needs, some of which need to be met more or less well before we can go on to meeting the others. At the base of the pyramid he put physiological needs;: air, water, food, sleep, clothing, shelter. That’s the Rule of Threes: three minutes without air, three hours without shelter in extreme conditions, three days without water, three weeks without food. Those will kill you. Three days without sleep risks permenant damage to your mind.
Next is Safety, so that we’re not being raided by Vikings, dragged off to prison at two in the morning because we said something wrong, mugged when we take money out of an ATM, let go from work because the order book is looking thin, or getting beaten and abused by parents, teachers, policemen, or the other kids at school.
Given some safety, we can move on to Social Belonging as evidenced by having friends, intimacy, and being on good terms with our family of origin and our own family if we have one.
After that, we have Esteem, that our abilities and contributions are recognised by people whose opinions we care about, and that generally, the people around us think we are a Good Fellow. And then at the top, we have Self-Actualisation, which is realising one’s potential and abilities.
Notice that without the idea that these items are a) needs, b) ordered, and c) must be satisfied in order, this is just a list of stuff that we would like to have. It has no force.
The Hierarchy does not describe how we botch our way through our lives, grabbing an hour of self-actualisation at the gym, an hour of living death on the commute, eight hours of insecure employment (lack of Security) to pay the bills and the taxes that provide policemen and defence (Security, of a sort), before returning to a frugal meal and an empty bed (lack of Social Belonging), while trying to get a promotion, improve our professional networks (Esteem), and maybe get a drink with the Lads at the weekend (Social Belonging). Jeez, what a mess.
A number of things are not on the list: wealth or high income, exceptional athletic, artistic or intellectual achievement, religious vocations, or anything else that requires sustained, time-consuming dedication and the risk that all the effort might not lead to the winner’s podium or the award ceremony. These are examples of self-actualisation, but cannot be achieved without delaying other lower-order needs for so long it counts as abandonment. In other words, without some nifty verbal gymnastics, the Hierarchy is self-contradictory. You can’t have it all. Not without a lot of money, luck and a solid character.
But maybe decribing these compromises wasn’t Maslow’s aim.
Maslow studied what he called exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people, writing that "the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy.” Maslow studied the healthiest 1% of the college student population.Maslow originally put sex in the physiological needs, and large numbers of puritans disagreed with him, or prissily said it was there because the survival of the human race. Some descriptions of the Hierarchy leave it out. Was Maslow on to something? Perhaps he thought that if a vigorous young man isn’t getting laid on the regular, he’s going to be distracted in the pursuit of his higher needs? I was a young man once, and I approve that insight.
That was what made me wonder if Maslow was pointing at something else, but happy to be lucratively misunderstood. I started this with the intention of explaining why the Heirarchy was nonsense. Then I wondered: what if Maslow was right? Not about how people manage to bodge and survive their way through the circumstances of their lives, but about what the circumstances of our life must be, to be satisfying as it is lived, rather than in retrospect when there’s money in the bank, awards on the walls and every Maitre d’ in town knows your name and face. What if the Hierarchy is actually a diagnostic tool rather than a truth about people?
C-Heads describes "the 21st century girl… a chick of many talents, one moment she’s in Europe, the next she’s in Asia. She’s working on several artistic projects at once and killing at every single one. She’s a mix of races – picking up different cultures as she travels. She’s the mysterious girl at the party you want to know her life story who everyone has their eyes on", and yet… what? She can go through the Maslow levels, tick or cross as applicable. When she finds herself arguing about whether this or that is really a need, that’s a cross. Now she can see what’s missing. And she may understand that, if she wants to go on killing it at every single project, then that's the price she pays.
Human beings are needy animals, and at any given time one or more of those needs will be going unmet. For many people, it’s far more than one and it’s every day of every week of every year. And the more lower-order needs go unmet, the shakier is the pursuit, and enjoyment, of the higher-order needs. The Hierarchy tells us where the structure of our lives and our selves is shaky. Reality tells us that the shakiness may just be the way it’s gotta be. Because The Hierarchy is impossible to satisfy from bottom to top. You have a choice: you can be satisfied and risk the occasional feeling that you haven’t made the most of what, if anything, God gave you; or you can aim to develop and exploit your abilities and talents, and accept the surety of dissatisfaction with this or that aspect of your life.
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