“Three quarters of the miseries and misunderstandings in the world would finish if people were to put on the shoes of their adversaries and understood their points of view”
Mahatma Gandhi
This blog thing is so liberating. You can talk about anything you want, even things you know nothing about!! Today your sewer engineer will delve into the area of psychology. My brother-in-law Ken who is a licensed psychologist is probably cringing. This foray is motivated by my experiences this week. I found myself in bed with the flu. As I was lying in bed moaning and groaning, I was once again reminded how quickly we can be reduced. Life really is fragile. And believe it or not, it brought to mind Maslov’s Hierarchy of Human Needs.
For those of you who have forgotten, failed or never took Psychology 101, Maslov was a psychologist who developed a theory way back in the early 1940s that attempted to at least in some ways explain human behavior and what is important to humans. He articulated it in a pyramid diagram separated into five “strata”. Starting from the bottom there were:
Physiological Needs – like breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis (the need for constancy and sustainability), excretion
Safety Needs – like the security of body, of employment, of resources, of morality, of the family, of health, of property
The Need for Love and Belonging – like friendship, family, sexual intimacy
The Need for Esteem – like self-esteem, confidence, achievement, respect OF others, respect BY others
The Need for Self-Actualization – like morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts
Maslov maintained that one can’t achieve the upper levels in the pyramid before he/she has met the needs in the lower levels and may not even aspire to them. This week I found myself sinking into the bottom stratum, the physiological level – really fast!! One of my physiological needs, the absence of pain, was missing. This caused me to not be able to consider any of the other levels. In other words, I really didn’t care about Brexit or the Green New Deal at all!! I wasn’t worried about how our 401K was doing. I didn’t think about what the neighbors or people in our church thought about me. I wore the same ratty night shirt for two days and didn’t care who knew it. Oops TMI.
Now, there have been other psychologists and just people in general that question Maslov’s underlying research and criticize the concept. But to someone with no knowledge of psychology like me, it kinda makes sense. I might add that any theory that’s been batted around since 1943 and is still widely accepted, probably has some validity. Maslov also said that depending on circumstances there can be different times in our life when we operate on different levels. That explains my sinking into the physiological stratum this week.
So, what is my point in all of this other than to tell you I had the flu? As people like me yak and yak about some of the abstractions in the upper levels of the pyramid, how easy it is to forget that in our country, the richest country in the world, there are SO many who are stuck in those lower levels of the pyramid. They are not involved in the dialogues about public policy, haute couture or the latest movies. They are working two or three minimum wage jobs, trying to put food on the table and keeping the wolf from the door – or perhaps ill, unemployed, just laid-off, estranged from family, disabled or otherwise disadvantaged. How unfair it is for those of us who are blessed to have those bases covered to criticize others who do not, for not achieving more in the layers above. Indeed, so many of us have no concept of what it would be like to experience some of the issues in the physiological stratum. How do you “self -actualize” when you are hungry? And by the way, after a few days of the flu I am reminded of how quickly we can slip to other levels in the pyramid. Maybe when we shake our heads at what “some people” do, we should think about where in the pyramid they are operating.