Dinner last evening involved a nice medium rare chateaubriand followed by a slice of cheesecake. Now the person I was having dinner with had had steaks in Texas and cheesecake from the cheesecake factory. Now this person was nice enough to not say anything but along the course of conversation it was established that nothing need be said since we both were astute readers of insinuation. Bottom line? I don't care this is the third world, there are no japanese hand massaged kobe steaks and no cheesecake factory, will live in the delusion that these are the best steaks I've had (it's not a delusion, it's actually true I haven't had better steaks).
Now on Maslow and his thoughts about life etc ...
It turns out that Maslow was the eldest of seven in a russian-jewish immigrant family in new york. Not just NYC but Brooklyn in the early 1900s. If Sigmund had met him he would go, "Hmmm, I zink I vould like you to lie down on zis couch, ja?" Then he went on to study, marry someone his parents didn't approve of, have a couple of kids and choose psychology and create an interesting theory and die of a heart attack.
It turns out that human beings (like you and me a few others I know) have needs. These needs are stratified and proceed from (obviously) a basal to a higher lever in the form of a triangle.
Right at the bottom are physiological needs, roughly translated to water, food and sex (in that order of requirement). Next are needs of security (financial, environmental). Then come social or emotional (the need to love and be loved, friendships, relationships). Just a step short of the apex are needs of esteem (including job satisfaction, the ability to respect others, and the need to be respected and appreciated). Finally right on top is self-actualization - a state where the only pursuit is perfection and the drive is to be the true "I".
Obviously this state can only be reached if the bottom rungs are more or less taken care of. If somebody's hungry, about to be killed, luckless in love, or the scapegoat at work it is rather unlikely he (or she) is going to get anywhere near self-actualization and thus actually life life utilizing his (or her) maximal potential.
This is of course assuming self-actualization is a drive to work towards a level of perfection and not sit under a tree or stand till covered by an anthill (a la Amar Chitra Katha). Strangely enough I've read enough to say that it is only when these needs no longer exist that one can attain nirvana but we aren't discussing that...
Maslow also noted that people could regress to a lower need state when the higher one was threatened... the need to be loved when work is bad, the need to hoard wealth if perhaps unloved, or simply the need to eat or sleep around if someone's stalking you to kill you...
And if there's an unmet need in childhood/development that persists in adulthood and can occasionally show up as a neurosis. Which is sort of consistent with the childhood deprivation theory of mental illness.
Though most psychiatrists no longer hold psychological theories in any regard this particular one can explain a lot about society and occasionally individual behaviour without having to go into why depression or obsessive compulsive disorders happen.
Why is most of the population explosion in a lower socio-economic class... is it perhaps because their needs of security are not met and are resorting to water/food/sex?
Why is productivity so low.. maybe deficiencies in every step below self-actualization are preventing the predicted 2% of population from getting there... Amartya Sen did get the nobel prize for simply stating that taking care of food health and education would be the most important first step in the achievement of a welfare state...
Just thoughts bouncing around in my head but it is something that needs a little more attention that what it's got till now.
