Being worried about other people lacking the bottom tier of the hierarchy -- is definitely what Maslow misnamed "self-actualization." If you read his examples instead of reading his title, you soon find it is about dedication to a principle of some kind.

One also notes that at the existence level, food and shelter actually are pretty easy to get in most industrialized nations, where most of what is done to get food and shelter is to serve higher needs.

Which is probably why most people don't realize it. It's in foreign countries.

Alas, it is heavily in foreign countries where you would need to invade and colonize to even seriously dent it.

Yeah, self-actualization is kind of an odd term. I understand it, but I prefer the other term he often used which was "self-transcendence". He also called these levels the Beingness Needs, as opposed to the Deficiency Needs of the physical and emotional stuff in his first four levels.

As for food and shelter needs in most industrial nations, they both are and are not easy to get. One one level, yes, we have plenty of things that meet these needs on a gross level, but the devil is in the details! Much of the food produced in the West is seriously bad for humans, both being deficient in most nutritional needs and full of toxic crap, both of which make the bottom platform of physiological (input) needs full of holes like a Jenga tower just before it topples. The same subtle deficiencies and toxicities exist when it comes to shelter (which often serves some of the physiological, belongingness, and occasionally the esteem needs). Think of how nearly everyone is under constant threat of "legal" removal from their own home by various laws regarding things like property law, insurance requirements, zoning and building codes, and rent/mortgages/taxes. As a US American, I have never felt particularly relaxed about whether or not I can get enough nutrients (I currently can't), and when I'll next be kicked out of my home because landlords or parents or whatever want to do something else with the place. I know most people are the same way, even if they aren't consciously aware of it. Most people don't even have a clue about whether or not they are getting their nutritional needs met. And most people have been convinced by for-profit marketing that it doesn't matter what they eat, as long as they feel full, leading to people eating empty calorie crap that really isn't food, and being constantly sick physically, and not even knowing why. I'd wager that nearly every case of long term depression is at least partially, if not entirely, caused by nutritional deficiencies and/or stress having to do with housing (which is connected often to money/employment). Seriously.

Which is why our life expentancy is decades longer than it was in any prior era of history?

Hmmmm? I'm not sure what you're referring to? Sure, we keep improving, on average, in being able to take care of ourselves. But that doesn't mean that most people aren't still struggling, and regularly stuck down in the survival level. It's also more subtle deficiencies and toxicities these days, including health problems caused by pollution, nutritional deficiencies (caused by processed, empty calorie "food"), and low grade stress about the economy, employment/money, housing etc. We're living longer, but we're sick more of the time than we used to be (when we naturally ate more whole, nutritious food, and exercised more, had more tight-knit communities that supported each others needs, and worked fewer hours to meet our needs). In the future, we should be able to sort these problems out so that we can have the best of both worlds, and continue to increase our lifespan AND our quality of life. :-)

on what grounds do you make your assertion about sickness?

Sorry, I don't know what you're looking for here...

What is the problem?

You don't know you made an assertion about sickness?

Or you don't know what grounds you made it on?

> What is the problem?

That's what I'm wondering. What is your problem? What are you looking for from me? Your questions and comments are vague and I can't even guess at what sort of information I should try to offer you. The best I can do is continue to give you me attention, which is pretty clear you want.

Earth to turil, come in please.

My problem is that you made a statement about modern day sickness and refuse to substantiate it even though I explicitly, and without the slightest trace of vaguenes, asked you to.

If you admit that the best you can do is bestow completely unwanted attention -- topped with ad hominems -- I will have to deduce that your claim was unsubstantiated.

I wish you well in finding whatever it is you need. I'm sorry I can't give you anything more than my attention when you ask for it, unless you are more specific about what you need from me. I do not understand what you are looking for, since everything I've said is pretty much general knowledge, based on life experience, rather than any one specific instance of something. You seem to want "substantiation" but since I'm giving you my personal perspective, there isn't much I can do, as I can't copy my brain over to you. It's all in here, in my brain, but all that substance isn't easily packaged up to be offered to others. And since my thoughts are indeed based on all the stuff inside my head, I really can't help you see what I see.

But if you have a specific question, I'll do my best to answer you.

I haven't read much dystopian fiction, but this statement:

"The fundamental choice presented by dystopian novels is whether to solve all the problems on the bottom rungs of Maslow's pyramid - all your poverty, disease, war, violence, and the like - at the expense of giving up on the top level..."

doesn't match my intuition. My intuition would have been something like this:

"Dystopian fiction posits that society is controlled by some authority that does not care about its citizens. Because of centralization the authority has the power to solve problems such as poverty and disease and violence, but because it doesn't care, these problems frequently go unsolved. In other words dystopian fiction is a cautionary tale about the dangers of handing over total power to a central authority."

As one example, I went and checked Wikipedia's plot summary for The Hunger Games (perhaps the best-known recent dystopian novel?) and I found this:

"The starvation and need for resources that the citizens encounter both in and outside of the arena create an atmosphere of helplessness that the main characters try to overcome in their fight for survival. Katniss's proficiency with the bow and arrow stems from her need to hunt in order to provide food for her family"

which makes me think that, at least in that example, the base elements on Maslow's hierarchy are not being met.

So I would want to have a better understanding of whether other recent dystopian novels were more similar to The Hunger Games or to your example of A Clockwork Orange.

Yeah, I'm limiting my use of "dystopian fiction" to those novels where people try to reform society, and superficially solve some problems, but on the whole it turns out evil. I haven't read "Hunger Games".

I agree that an evil government trying to do evil things would turn out evil, but where's the fun in that?

I've been reading the Hunger Games books and thinking about how they don't fit in with the model you've described. It's kind of about a society where the powerful region has so many of its lower-level needs met that they lounge around in Roman-style decadence while the outer regions toil miserably. The point seems to be that having all your needs met without working for it does not lead to self-actualization but just to vapidness. But the government never claims to be maximing its citizens' good, only the good of certain citizens.

Ella Minnow Pea is a very well-done epistolary novel in which the repressive government keeps banning letters of the alphabet, so the letters written between characters get gradually sparser and stranger.

Frankly, I don't *believe* in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

If I'm misinterpreting you, this says that people who lack basic material necessities (food, shelter, etc.) can't spend as much time caring about higher, more abstract goals (freedom, self-expression, honor, etc.)

To some extent that may be true; but there are people who are pretty horrifically lacking in material necessities, and passionate about abstract goals, to the point of *giving up* a chance at a more physically bearable life for the sake of those abstract goals. I'm not one of those people, but I've met them, and one of them is a close friend of mine. He's going through poverty and daily physical pain because the alternatives violate his principles.

People are capable of thinking about things besides bread, even when they have no bread. I, like you, feel a little sick at the thought of choosing *for* others that they should be spiritually uplifted rather than fed. But I also don't think it's only the privileged who suffer when you take away self-actualization. It's not really a pyramid. Poor people need freedom too (depending on the situation, sometimes they need it *more* than rich people), and sometimes people care about relationships more than their health, or religion more than either.

I think a lot of folks who don't see the patterns of development that Maslow was trying to help us understand haven't been presented with the theory in an effective way. As a developmental specialist, and educator of young children, I can definitely say that the patterns of motivation that Maslow generally discussed are very obvious, once you understand what they look like in humans.

One thing that I think many people don't understand about development and the brain is that it's complex and fractal. There are many different regions of the brain that do different things. Some govern emotions, some govern physical movement and regulate basic body processes, and others solve math problems. Most of the time, these all run in parallel. And once a region is mostly developed biologically (by the time a human is about 4 years old it has most of the basic brain functions of an adult, though the intellectual ability is not as sophisticated, of course). That's why you can be hungry and still be able to do you taxes, at least reasonably well. But the more deficient you are in the base of the pyramid, the more easily the stuff you want to do at the top of the pyramid goes wrong. The self-transcendent thinking, near the top of the pyramid, which simply means caring about others and feeling like being a part of a larger whole, will naturally be there in any human past preschool level, but the physical and emotional ability to act on those thoughts successfully can be easily compromised when there is a problem at the physical and emotional levels of need. Which is why if you have a deficiency in vitamin D (synthesized in your skin using the energy from the sun, usually), your brain will struggle, and eventually fail, in solving social problems.

What Maslow's pyramid shows us is the general pattern of motivation, similar to the genre of a movie. The details and complexity of the plot of human motivation are much messier!

Yes, you're right. People don't necessarily go through the hierarchy in order, and it's such an elegant concept that I didn't spend five seconds thinking about that.

I'm not sure why the concept attracts me so much or why I still find myself wanting to defend it.

I don't, however, think that interferes with the argument above: as long as being higher-status is associated with relatively greater ease satisfying physiological needs than self-actualization needs, people will still signal by showing how much more self-actualization means to them.

I use the hierarchy to help develop characters -- not by assuming they go in sequence, but by asking how a purpose would serve a need -- or serve to undermine it, or both at once.

Humans definitely do go through the hierarchy in order, it's just that most people don't pay that much attention to little kids to see the very linear pattern of growth, just as described by Maslow. After a level is developed (in the brain) it's always there, so we're always in the highest level of motivation, except when more primitive needs are temporarily compromised and we are forced to drop our attention down to the more basic level before we can return to the highest level we've so far achieved.

I think this is where most people get confused, in thinking that Maslow was talking about adults going through these stages. But the fact is that everyone above the age of about 4 has the basic structure for thinking about other people and feeling a part of a community (self-actualized/self-transcendent)

I've just read your Consequentialism FAQ (y hello thar insomnia). It was an enjoyable and thought-provoking read, thank you.

One topic that you don't cover there is decision-making heuristics and in particular short-term vs. long-term benefit trade-offs. People will make different decisions about the weight that they give to certain benefits, and there isn't an objective measure. (An example in the UK, where I live, is the debate as to whether public money should be invested in IVF. The two opposing sides appear to be acting on consequentialist principles but weighting outcomes differently.)

Do you have any thoughts on this? Have you written about it elsewhere?

Thanks for reading.

I'm not really sure I understand what you mean. Can you give an example?

To expand on IVF, I think there are several legitimate consequentialist positions that one could take.

Broadly:

(1) IVF is a good use of public funds even in a limited-resource environment (eg because the cost of averting trauma in parents who cannot give birth naturally is worthwhile).

(2) In a limited-resource environment, using the available money to treat and / or prevent illness in people who already exist is a better use of funds than investing trying to create more people.

Each of these have social policy implications (eg importance of parenting, seeing children as a right vs a responsibility, possible social engineering if you want more middle class parents).

There's arguably also a position (3), which is 'it depends upon context', where context in this instance is, I suppose, mainly defined by amount of funding available and map of the population needs.

But I am not sure that I even think that (3) is an entirely pragmatic heuristic in policy formation. There will still be some underlying beliefs that drive that decision, which will be consequential - what is seen to be the value to the general population of going one way or the other. But that view will not be the same for everyone.

Accepting the whole "selfish gene we are a delivery mechanism for genes" premise means it's not so surprising we're primed to discard basic needs for principles. Proper signalling is life and death for reproductive fitness.

I have a few things to add, as the person who chose to pick up the work on needs where Maslow left off (is there anyone else in the world doing this?)...

Since the human mind is highly complex, and most likely fractal, except for babies, we all operate on many different levels of consciousness at once. So we can be operating at the bottom of the pyramid in one area of our brain and up nearer to the top in another area of brain. That's why you get people who are trying to think philosophically who are doing it badly because they have some nagging deficiency down in the survival needs (maybe a nutritional deficiency, or being stuck inside with stale air and no sunlight all the time).

For example, those good folks in politics, while very likely WANTING to serve the world (the higher self-transcendence levels of Maslow's pyramid), are getting messed up when it comes to the details of how to do it because their brains are still struggling to work properly, due to some deficiency or toxicity. And fashion, what is intended as a creative/artistic expression serving the self-transcendent motivation near the upper-middle of the pyramid, ends up being screwed up by subtle problems with the self down at the base of the pyramid.

This explains the inner conflict when an adult (who's brain has biologically reached at least the intellectual stages of development, in addition to the earlier emotional and physical stages), can think one thing, feel another, and do a third thing.

It's only when the small details of the solidity of the platform - the physical needs - are attended to that the brain can fully function in a unified effort, so that it can actually achieve the highest ideals it has for world-centric, and eventually life-centric thinking. Until those detailed physical needs are well met, there will be a whole lot of good intentions with bad outcomes.

There are practical reasons transfer of resources from the self-actualized group to a subsistence group to a noticeable degree is beyond the pale.

The governing class is always self-actualized, because governance is a form of abstract reasoning. Any measure that transfer resources from a self-actualized group to a subsistence group, turning both into subsistence groups also by its nature removes the self-actualized group from the governing class. This makes it a power grab and has balance of power implications even for those not directly involved.

Edited at 2012-02-09 03:12 pm (UTC)

Huh? It is true, and as old as Aristotle, to observe that men do not become tyrants so that they will not suffer from the cold, but the overwhelming number of politicans are after need #3 -- status.

A lot of the principles that drive aversion to radical solutions have value as heuristics, even if they may be over-applied by many people.

For example, consider the heuristic "Privacy is good." It is very likely true that ubiquitous surveillance could be a very valuable law enforcement tool: making it much easier to catch and punish criminals, reducing crime due to both restraint and deterrence, while simultaneously greatly reducing the wrongful conviction rate due to much better-quality data.

But that's if the data is used correctly and responsibly. If the data's abused, it can also be a very powerful tool for controlling dissent against an odious regime, and at a lesser level of abuse it can be used for private blackmail or voyeurism by mid-level officials.

I can see plausible arguments on both sides, but I prefer a heuristic that puts a strong burden of evidence on those advocating ubiquitous surveillance to argue that the benefits would outweigh the costs and risks.

More broadly, I support a general heuristic along the likes of P.J. O'Rourke's observation that "As anyone who's asked 'What's the big idea?' knows, most big ideas are bad ones." There are a number of high-profile real-life examples of attempts to impose radical institutional changes that produced genuinely dystopian outcomes. One of the biggest modern examples, Marxism, had a fairly strong intellectual basis behind it. Likewise for the big early 19th century example of the French Revolution.

It's a combination of Chesterton's Gate and Cromwell's Rule. The thing that makes radical reforms radical is that they're meant to replace significant portions of existing (traditional, evolved) institutions and practices with new (intelligently designed) institutions and practices. If everything works as planned by the reformers, it could work out great. The old institutions could be genuinely perverse or obsolete, and the new institutions could genuinely be significant improvements. However, if there's something you overlooked, if there's some critical still-valid use of the old institution (Chesterton) that you forgot to replace, or if there's some flaw in your replacement (Cromwell), the results could be disastrous.

I suppose the main thrust of your argument against dystopias isn't negated by my arguments. As you say, many fictional dystopias (in particular, the ones you appear to have in mind) focus on radical changes that work as intended for most of Maslow's pyramid but have flaws near the top. My arguments are more focused on dystopian scenarios that are catastrophic up and down the pyramid: historical dystopian scenarios like the Stalin's Purges or the Reign of Terror or WW2 and the Holocaust, or fictional dystopian scenarios like 1984 or V for Vendetta.

In other news, I've been toying with the idea of writing a short story called Green Man's Burden, in which the narrator looks back at a modern alien invasion from something like 50 years down the road, taking a bunch of standard dystopian tropes being imposed by our New Alien Overlords, but having them work out (at least in the narrator's view) for the best.

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I felt this way about "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"; we already power our civilization on forsaken children, and our forsaken-child-to-happy-villager ratio is way worse than theirs. I don't think Le Guin proved what she was setting out to prove with that story.