Remember not too long ago I wrote about having a sofa experience which led me to dispute several well-known, internationally-accepted theories?
And I said that I didn't really know whether I should write what I thought about them, having no intention to get into long-winded debates on whether this philosophy or that philosophy influences or guides our behavior or not?
Well, controversial or not, I suppose I've decided to write about them after all.
One theory, at least. :)
You see, I first heard about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs nearly two decades ago- during one of my Marketing modules. It was efficiently described in the textbook- which I still have.
If you've never heard about what this theory is about, or who he is, well, he's this dude who was born to Russian migrants and grew up in a working class neighborhood in NYC, and whom during his childhood, faced a great deal of anti-Semitism and so he grew up experiencing what it was like to be bullied. His parents believed in education, however, and so he went on to study in a college in New York. That's the basic backgrounder I recall from the Wikipedia article.
The theory was formulated in 1943. Offhand, I don't recall where precisely he was during the years of WWII, but I do remember that he was married with a wife and was also a father of 2 (or 3) children and so thereby was unqualified for military enlistment. Why, and for what purpose he researched and formulated this theory, I don't know either. (It's probably written somewhere, and I've ignored looking into it.)
To the theory itself, it is this. A very, very well-recognized, a very, very well acknowledged diagram.
I've taken this diagram- quite liberally- from Wikicommons. Of course, I could have taken a picture of the same diagram in Page XXX of my Kotler textbook and then posted it here, but that's another point altogether.
What this diagram generally means is that all humans have these needs, and whilst they aren't as rigid as they appear here, meaning that we all have esteem and a sense of belonging and physiological needs all at the same time, there are varying degrees of fulfillment- and it starts from the bottom. Only when the lower level is fulfilled, then can you feel the need to fulfill the next level, and so on.
Which means that if you're lacking food, water or sleep or excretion, you're not going to think about employment, resources, family, health and morals. And if you're not established in your resources and family and morals, you don't feel safe, and since you don't feel safe, you don't seek to have fulfilling relationships and intimacy. And so on, and so forth.. until you reach self-actualization at the top.
I'm not disputing this triangle. Nope, not at all. After all, it has directed businesses, relationships, societies, economies and so on, since 1943. It has shaped the world that we've grown up in, it has shaped the world where baby boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, Millenials, Xennials and maybe even Gen Z live in.
But, you see, real-life experiences are a different matter altogether. It is not a case of doing research on the top 1% of top colleges and creating a theory based on the results. I'm not sure about some of the names featured in the Wikipedia article where I did my reading from, but I wouldn't quite think that they experienced the main physiological problems (excluding sex- people's bodies don't deteriorate from not having sex).
Real-life experiences, and real-life 'traumas' change how you perceive life, and how you perceive these theories that you believe have been created to guide you. Real-life experiences make you question the validity and the relevance of these theories.
And I'm telling you, as far as I'm concerned, the order's all wrong.
It's not that you fulfill your hunger drive or thirsty drive before you go on to finding a place to belong or respect others. If we so follow this order, then we'd really find ourselves in a very chaotic situation. We'd all go crazy trying to satiate ourselves with those needs. We'd all go animistic trying to fulfill those fundamental, physiological needs. I suppose riots are a fairly clear description of that.
It works the same for building a family or establishing relationships. If you're going to have great relationships or if you're seeking to build a beautiful family, then you've gotta possess confident self-esteem. You've gotta respect others and have the respect of others first before you establish healthy relationships. It's not the other way around. Whilst healthy families and fulfilling relationships do enhance our self esteem and make us confident of ourselves, it can also work us towards the opposite direction in many a way.
It's like, you might not be hungry and you might not be thirsty and you might have your sexual needs filled, but does that mean that you'll be safe in your morals, your health or even your employment? And let's say that you're safe in all of that, you've got a job, you're guarding your behaviors pretty well and you're fit and all, does that mean that you'll start searching for intimate relationships where you'll feel loved, or feel a sense of belonging in?
It's not quite the case, is it, in our society of the day?
How many people do we know that are secure in their jobs or their health but seek out intimacy? Is that a given? Is that how it works? Frankly, I cannot be so sure.
If there's one thing that sofa experience taught me, it's that self-actualization should be at the bottom. Not the top. It's not a journey getting up there. It's an acknowledgement, an internalization that you are already up there. That you're already creative. That you're already spontaneous. That you're already a problem-solver. That you're already moral, unprejudiced and that you're striving to solve problems larger than what's glaring at you in your face.
Then, and only then, can you tackle all the other s*** effectively.
I speak from real, painful experience. An experience that still haunts me from time to time and affects my decisions as and when it happens. I don't want to go into details here, not because it's painful to speak of it, but because hey, I'm private like that.
But I'll just say this.
If I hadn't started from the self-actualization, if I hadn't realized that there was something else I should be looking at, if I hadn't realized that there was a divinity in all of it, if I hadn't internalized that there was in fact a greater problem waiting to be solved and a greater purpose in all of this d*** s***a** of a situation that I could possibly address, I would have handled my situation very differently.
When I was really hungry, and depending on a stick of sugar pilfered from a coffee joint (sorry!) to bolster my spirits up, when I had eaten my last biscuit in my bag and I only had a dollar to last me for two meals till the next day, when for reasons I won't disclose, I found myself spending sleepless nights outdoors instead of beneath a shelter, with no place to manage daily hygiene, when I walked up and down from one destination to another instead of taking a bus because I didn't have the fare, when I pilfered (sorry, again!) a mug of milk from the coffee machine because I'd consumed everything else with me and I didn't have enough to get anything else, and in the midst of it all, I had to carry on meeting people and do what my role required me to do... if I hadn't an ounce of self-actualization in me, I'd either have spiraled downhill, or lost all sense of control and composure.
Behind every discussion, behind every smile, behind every caregiving effort that I felt was needed to the patient, behind every thought-process during that period of time, was a very, very tired, very, very hungry individual surviving only on the understanding that this whole f**ked up s*** was not what I was meant for.
I started with the understanding of who I was. I started with the understanding that who I was determined how I'd handle the situation. If this s*** was going to blow over, I'd not want to be ashamed of what I'd done. If this s*** was going to blow over me, and it did, and it has, I'd not want to look back and wonder why the heck I did what I did. I'd want to look back and realize that, hey, despite the a** of a situation, I'd held my own.
Which I did, thankfully.
And I'm now wondering if it means that this theoretical approach is a load of c**p. Through personal observations (and no more else), I'm wondering if this approach towards the Maslow Hierarchy fosters a chronic dependency on systems that feed (yet never fulfill) the physiological. I'm wondering if this approach hinders quality and productivity. I'm wondering if this approach makes for complacency and disregard of healthy relationships.
Because when one hasn't reached the self-actualization, when one is still at the lower levels and is content and complacent to remain at those levels, and when one has the safety nets to maintain them at those levels, then quality is compromised, moral codes are abused and in the end, everyone simply operates and behaves and deals with life in the way they want to, disregarding right or wrong, disregarding others, becoming selfish, becoming greedy and complacent and gluttony and all. How then, does staying at the lower levels not become destructive to the self, and to the community and society in general?
At least, that's what I think the cause and effect seems to be.
It sounds kinda chaotic.
No, it sounds very chaotic.