This blog is now in its sixth year. One of the interesting things about having a large back catalogue of posts is you get to see which ones receive the most amount of traffic from search engines. By far the best-performing of my posts in that regard is one that I probably spent the least amount of time writing. I threw it together based on an idea I was kicking around at the time about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I called it the Inverted Maslow Hierarchy. Interested readers can find it here.
As I pointed out at the time, I hadn’t read any of Maslow’s work when I wrote the post two and a half years ago, but I recently got around to checking out the original essay that introduced the hierarchy of needs concept. It’s a short work from 1943 called “A Theory of Human Motivation”.
One of the things that surprised me about the paper is how weak the argumentation is. Maslow provides almost no empirical evidence for the hierarchy of needs and very little convincing explanation for it. In fact, on a number of occasions he provides arguments that call the idea into question. For example, he points out that “higher needs” sometimes trump lower ones. He also notes that some individuals seem not to have certain needs at all. Despite these problems, the paper concludes with a repetition of the initial premise that “lower” needs must be satisfied before “higher” ones may be pursued.
Apparently, Maslow modified the initial theory later in his career to address some of the obvious problems. Interestingly from my point of view, it seems that Viktor Frankl played a fairly significant role in that, since Frankl was also a critic of the hierarchy of needs concept. For those who don’t know Frankl’s work, he claimed that meaning is our primary need and that all other needs are (or should be) subordinate to the need for meaning.
Frankl famously spent several years in concentration camps, and this gives his focus on meaning extra poignancy because, from the point of view of Maslow’s hierarchy, the lower needs were not met in the concentration camps, and yet, some individuals still managed to manifest the higher ones. Thus, Frankl’s disagreement with Maslow was not just a philosophical but an empirical one. He had seen it with his own eyes.
To sketch the outlines of Frankl’s disagreement, we can use what is probably the most basic of our needs: the need for food. Physiological needs are the bottom rung of Maslow’s pyramid, and most people would agree that food and water are the most fundamental of those. In his paper, Maslow notes that people deprived of food become “obsessed” with the subject. This makes intuitive sense and lends credence to the idea that those who have not had their lower needs met cannot pursue higher ones.
However, there are a number of problems with this claim. The first one is that an “obsession” with food is not just borne out of the absence of it. Food obsession can also occur when there is a surplus. There’s a reason why gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins.
Maslow wrote his paper in 1943 and could not have envisaged that only decades later we would live in a world where excess food consumption is a common and widespread issue leading to obesity, diabetes and other health problems. In our time, the obsession with food is not just limited to its initial consumption but also to dealing with the aftereffects.
Thus, we have all kinds of fad diets, exercise programs, and pharmaceutical interventions. All of this proves that it is not just the absence of food but its excess which drives human behaviour. Even basic physiological needs are not an either/or equation but are about the establishment of a stable equilibrium. It is the break from equilibrium that is important.
That observation leads to a second problem with Maslow’s theory. The need for food is not a linear process but a complex one. If it was linear, we would expect hunger to grow as a function of time since the last meal. That is, the need for food would increase until it became the sole preoccupation of the individual. In fact, as anybody who has done fasting knows, this is not the case. Hunger tends to come and go in short bursts. Furthermore, there are at least several different types of hunger. Some of these are purely psychological; others correspond to physiological changes.
We now know that there are several phase changes that occur at the physiological level with the absence of food. The body will metabolise glucose wherever this is available. When it becomes unavailable, as in the case where the individual has not eaten for some time, the body begins to metabolise fats and proteins instead. This releases ketones, which then become the primary source of energy instead of glucose.
Psychologically speaking, what we generically call hunger is actually reduced during this ketogenic phase. In addition, there can be a rather pleasant feeling of both high energy and high mental concentration, at least in the early stages of ketogenesis. In simple terms, we would say that the need for food is reduced during this time, even though food hasn’t been eaten for a relatively long period.
Eventually, if no food is eaten, the body will start to metabolise more important things like organs, and that is when the genuine danger begins. During this phase, cognition starts to become impaired, and therefore it’s still not accurate to say that there is a unified “hunger” response marked by an intense desire for food. The physical and mental concentration required for such begins to disappear. Finally, it seems that in the fatal phase of starvation, hunger disappears altogether.
We can see that hunger is not a simple need but rather a process involving a complex series of psychological and physiological interactions. That is before we even get into the social aspects of the situation, since hunger in the individual almost always implies a background of societal breakdown. Maslow’s invocation of a simple need that corresponds to the absence of food, although true in the broadest sense, misleads more than it enlightens.
But even that is not the main objection to the hierarchy of needs. Per Frankl, meaning is the highest human need, and it should trump all other needs, including the most fundamental physiological ones. It turns out that there is an event from almost the exact same time that Maslow was writing his paper that demonstrates this point in the clearest of terms, since it actually involves a scientific study on the subject of starvation.
The Warsaw ghetto was created by the Nazis in 1940. Food provisions in the ghetto had been limited from the beginning, but the shortages were intensified in the months before the ghetto was finally liquidated in early 1943. It was clear the Nazis were trying to starve the inhabitants to death.
A group of doctors in the ghetto decided to begin studying the effects of starvation on the general population. The results of their study are worth reading, but the more important point is the dedication and willpower required to conduct the study at all. The doctors themselves were being starved, since they lived in the ghetto too. Nevertheless, they managed to stick to a rigorous program of data measurement and collection.
Maslow’s hierarchy predicts that people should not be able to pursue higher goals like scientific research when their lower needs are not being met, but the doctors of the Warsaw ghetto proved him wrong. This was, of course, exactly what Frankl had realised from his own experiences in an almost identical situation, and that’s why he would later criticise Maslow’s hierarchy and posit that meaning was primary, even in situations of extreme physiological deprivation.
In one sense, this is quite an obvious conclusion. History shows that people are willing even to sacrifice their lives for higher causes. However, history tends to focus on dramatic acts of heroism such as war fighting and religious martyrdom. What Frankl and the doctors of the Warsaw ghetto showed was also a kind of heroism. Hannah Arendt would later introduce the phrase ‘banality of evil’ to account for the atrocities of the era. But it’s also true that there was a banality of heroism at work. It was the quiet determination to pursue meaning against all odds.
In fairness to Maslow, his early work is amenable to this idea, and his later work does seem to have done much to correct the errors of his initial position. Nevertheless, it is his initial formulation of the hierarchy of needs that has remained a popular meme in post-war culture.
This raises an important question: why has the simplified hierarchy of needs enjoyed such widespread support despite the obvious problems with the idea and despite the fact that Maslow himself moved away from it later in his life? Why is everybody familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy and almost nobody with Frankl’s ideas about the primacy of meaning?
The answer is that the assumptions of the hierarchy of needs match the broader social and political paradigm that has taken hold in the aftermath of WW2.
Firstly, the hierarchy in its initial formulation was intrinsically individualistic, and this fitted into the political philosophy of liberalism with its focus on freedom. The focus on needs also fits into the socialist paradigm because it implies a checklist of requirements that the state should provide for its citizens.
Related to both of the above was the close correlation between the hierarchy of needs and what came to be called human rights. These were motivated by the desire to prevent a recurrence of the concentration camps and other abuses by nation states against minorities. Within this framing, the individualism of the needs/rights concept was seen as an antidote to the totalitarianism of state ideology.
This is also why an implicit hierarchy of needs framing is used unconsciously by almost all modern democratic politicians. Modern democracies are still nation states and therefore perfectly capable of totalitarianism, as we saw during the covid years. Democratic politicians love to invoke the hierarchy of needs as a way to reassure the public that the state is really on their side. Hence, the endless bloviating about how the government is there to keep the public “safe”.
Finally, it’s not hard to see how Maslow’s hierarchy fits neatly into the capitalist paradigm where the market will provide for the needs of the individual and where those needs can grow along with the economy. The keeping-up-with-the-Joneses mentality (i.e. the need for self-esteem) allows the consumer economy to continually expand.
Putting it all together, we can see how the hierarchy of needs has come to serve as a kind of shorthand for the entire post-war paradigm of liberalism, democracy, technocracy and capitalism. Politicians, technocrats, and capitalists are all falling over themselves to provide for our needs. Everybody is in furious agreement that needs must be met. The only question is who can do it best, the market, the state, or the experts. In practice, it’s all of the above.
Therein lies another major weakness in Maslow’s theory. His initial model made no distinction between needs which are satisfied through our own agency and those which are satisfied for us. This implies that we can reach the self-actualisation phase without having ever lifted a finger to provide either for our own needs or the needs of others. One of the results is widespread narcissism.
By placing the self-actualisation phase at the tip of the pyramid, Maslow, perhaps inadvertently, relegated meaning to some rare or elevated state, a distant Shangri-La set far above the vagaries of everyday life. Meaning then becomes separated from reality, and this allows the machine whose job it is to provide for our lower-level needs to run unimpeded. The majority of life then becomes meaningless.
Frankl’s emphasis on meaning was meant to prevent exactly this outcome, and it’s worth pointing out that he was not alone in sensing the danger that comes from the separation of meaning from the everyday world. The banality of heroism says that we are free at any time to insist that meaning comes first and foremost in our lives. If we don’t, we end up with the very modern problem of having an excess of basic necessities while being existentially starved.
In common parlance we say something is meaningful if it is in some way connected to the attainment of a goal that we believe in. But all goals are worthless if life simply ends with death. The problem with modern life is that life after death has become taboo out of distaste for the Church’s old penchant for using the idea to control it’s followers. Inadvertantly, by dismissing the issue, secularisation has made it impossible to live deeply.
It’s time to retrieve the baby of meaning from the discarded bathwater of abusive religion. Once we can conceive of goals that are not torn asunder by death’s door, we can start talking and experimenting with reviving and creating pathways. That’s the stuff of meaningful tradition for the sake of stability, freedom, prosperity, happiness and peace.
Jinasiri – yes, that’s definitely part of the answer. Although, there’s a more mundane observation that follows from your definition of attaining goals that we believe in. If we define needs as goals, then the maximum of meaning comes from the free attainment of them. That is, people, both individually and in groups, are allowed to define and attain their own ends. That never happens anymore since the state, the market, and the technocracy all insert themselves between people and their needs. To a degree that is almost certainly unprecedented in history, the majority of people very rarely attain self-defined goals. That’s what leads to the epidemic of meaninglessness.
That is, in a millieu where people’s sense faculties are incessantly harassed, they find themselves unable to introspect. As The Smashing Pumpkins said: “The world is a vampire – set to drain.”
Our lifeblood is actually our attention. Power comes over others starts with stripping people of the capacity to direct their own eyes and ears. After that controlling bodies is easy.
This why regular contemplative practices lead to freedom. Get good at redirecting attention within and the attention vampires no longer have a foothold. But not any kind of introspection will do. Doing it the wrong way can get one stuck in cults.
That’s one of the other tricks. Get the mainstream cultists to feel superior to the minority cultists and the minority cultists to feel superior to the mainstream cultists so that hardly anybody wakes up to the fact that they too are part of a cult.
Jinasiri – speaking of cults, i saw a revealing interaction the other day where somebody actually made the claim that cooking your own food was indicative of “poverty”. There are apparently a lot of people who gain a perverse pleasure from not having to satisfy their own needs since somebody else will do it for them.
It’s useful to have a simple yet accurate of what a cult is. And it’s closely related to the a priori need for meaning. To the extent the leaders (teachers, parents, politicians, bosses, captains, elders …) of a group have the intention to deepen the dependency of their followers, to that extent the group is a cult. By convincing people that meaning is not possible, not necessary or something to be met only later, they are incapable of the existential confidence that nurtures true maturity and independence at all other levels of being. Spiritually and emotionally, most humans today haven’t gotten past adolescence.
Of course convincing people that they need not know how to cook, garden or build their own homes does the same thing at a different level. But the thrust of this article is important. If we don’t prioritise meaning before our bread, then the bread becomes … well … meaningless.
Jinasari – the related point to that is that quality degrades in the absence of meaning. Just last week I opened the first batch of olives I pickled earlier this year using a combination of chilli, thyme, and lemon. The depth of flavour is incredible, far superior to anything I’ve ever bought at the supermarket. Now, I’m looking for reasons to cook anything with olives just to be able to enjoy the taste. Cooking and eating becomes an adventure since I’m actually paying attention to the flavour. In short, life becomes more meaningful, all because I spent a few hours pickling some olives!
The special qi creates by a mind peacefully engaging with it’s everyday activities makes proteins fold differently. The difference in taste is not just in the mind.
I like that. “Folded with love”.
Simon – “In short, life becomes more meaningful, all because I spent a few hours pickling some olives!”
And it can be free. Here in Israel there are often olive trees growing in public gardens. Since few bother picking the olives, many years I don’t even have to buy any olives at all, as I pickle a large bin at a time.
If you don’t do so already, I would suggest dropping some cloves of garlic next time. They add flavor but also become pickled garlic, which I often prize even more that the olives.
What I found is that many people think doing this is a lot of work, but the work itself can be relaxing. So I work while someone else may be scrolling on his phone while relaxing from work, but this work has value by itself. But most people would still prefer scrolling. Maybe because if there is no meaning, only pleasure has value.
Bakbook – thanks for the tip. I’ll definitely try that next year, especially because I’ll have some home grown garlic to use. In fact, I’ll be harvesting it in the next few days.
What I’ve found with gardening is that it only becomes “work” if you save it til the weekends or, even worse, do it a couple of times a month. By contrast, if you do 15 minutes a day, it doesn’t feel like work. As for the pickling process, the best way to do it is to invite a few friends around, play some music, have a few drinks. You make a party of it and you can also give some of the produce to your friends.
That’s a good way to go about it!
As for continually doing gardening work: I did not get into biodynamic gardening yet, but one thing I heard made me want to give ot a try. The arguement was, that if nothing else, biodynamic gardening gets you into the garden every day, and encourages you to pay attention. And this can be effective on its own.
Makes sense. Once you get good enough at gardening, you should be harvesting food every day, anyway. That gives you an incentive to spend some time in the garden!
Hi Simon,
Yes, exactly. The west is enjoying a monster existential crisis. It’s not pretty. And I believe that Maslow’s hierarchy as usually presented completely overlooks the concept of quality, by providing a set path. That’s simply a falsity. There are many paths, and choices, as you noted in your essay.
You might get a chuckle out of this, but people always ask me the horrendous question: How much money do I need to be able to retire in comfort? I’m not allowed to answer that question at risk of serious consequences. So, I always reply that a person requires three things for retirement: Purpose; Hobbies; and Social Connections. Some of the responses to that advice have been quite negatively emotionally charged, mostly because it holds a mirror up and poses some tough questions.
Cheers
Chris
Chris – as an experiment, why not recite back to them the other end of the hierarchy: “well, you need to maintain a pulse and a body temperature somewhere in the high 30s.”
Simon. 🙂 Might just try that!