New World Order

(Video Included at the End of this Article)

Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs has to be inverted for any hope of a new world order. It’s been the wrong way around since the start and it has helped bring the human species to the brink of self-destruction.

Our lives lack meaning – personal depression and emotional pain are rife in the first world. People are suffering the effects of war, resource depletion, urban poverty and rural famine – global suffering abounds.

The liberalisation revolution of the last decades of the last century and the first decades of this century did not solve the problems in the world. Nor will the return to populist nationalism we are seeing towards the end of this the second decade of this century.

Both of these world orders are flawed by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

What Maslow says

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is often portrayed in the shape of a pyramid with the largest, most fundamental levels of needs at the bottom. Maslow called these fundamental needs the “deficiency needs”, namely: esteem and physical needs. If these “deficiency needs” are not met the individual will feel anxious. Only with these lower needs met can the higher need of self-actualisation be met.

In his later years, Maslow explored a further dimension of higher need. He said the self only finds its actualization in giving itself to some higher goal outside oneself, in altruism and spirituality.

“Transcendence refers to the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos” (Farther Reaches of Human Nature, New York 1971, p. 269).

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs looks like this:

One of the most pervasive influences

The hierarchy burst onto the scene in the early 1950’s. Since then it has profoundly influenced how we view human beings. It is perhaps one of the most well-known and influential developmental models of human psyche.

Through its prominence in western academia, psychology and motivational theory, and its resultant acceptance in mainstream business motivation, it has had a major influence on what we deem as important in the world. It has affected every aspect of marketing, business, philanthropic intent, liberal democracy, globalisation and socio-political direction.

Maslow has spawned global capitalism. It is the psychological motivation for getting consumer goods to every square inch of this Earth’s surface. It has subtly made materialism a virtue. Most people under the influence of the worldview of Maslow consider material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values.

Maslow’s model has made physical and emotional needs fundamental. In nearly seventy years we’ve sought to meet the physical and emotional needs of ourselves and our societies – whether as narcissistic capitalists or liberal philanthropists. And we’ve gone downhill as individuals and as a species.

Maslow is wrong… or at least incorrectly extrapolated in the world.

The blight of our world order

Our projection of the importance of physical and emotional needs onto the third world has created an ever-burgeoning population of dependents. Our misdirected philanthropy has caused overpopulation and spiralling famine and water shortages in lands meant to support fractions of what they now support.

First world consumerism and global capitalism deplete the Earth’s resources. Our addictions, born from the belief that we must meet our needs to solve our anxiety, have created a society of medicated neurotics. Our imposition of our model of needs onto others has created cauldrons of conflict and inhuman violence.

Something has to change

We have to wake up to the fact that spiritual needs are the most important and fundamental needs of humankind. Maslow’s hierarchy must go for a new world order.

Our convenient lives with food, water and energy on tap have fooled us. Our insurance and barbed wire has us living risk-free, safe lives… isolated and depressed. We store up money and possessions to make sure our children are never wanting.

We think we would die without these things on tap. And so we might… but we’re dying spiritually anyway. Our indoctrination is pervasive. The media has sold us the line: we need all these things. They have us believing it is our natural entitlement to have our biological and physiological needs met… or we will be anxious.

But millions don’t have these needs on tap. They survive on much less. Millions go to be bed slightly hungry every night, in the dark, or by the dim light of a fire. Their biological and physiological needs are less than ours. But they are happier. They may be physically poor… but they are spiritually alive.

Less of Maslow’s fundamental needs leaves space for more self-actualization and transcendence.

We must embrace self-actualization and transcendence as our most important needs. Stop storing up possessions and wealth and live with less. This is the path to a happy life… and a sustainable population.

Esteem and physical needs are not the fundamental needs without which individuals are anxious. Self-actualisation and transcendence are. Individuals are anxious and our species is doomed without self-actualisation and transcendence.

A new world order

This new paradigm of human needs is the foundation for a new world order. There can be no world order that solves our problems without a change in the understanding of human nature. We have to understand that humans are spiritual animals – and place the needs of the spiritual animal in the first world above the needs of the physical animal in the first world.

If we can do this we can create a world order of love and compassion emergent from a matrix of self-actualized individuals. Put differently, a world of individuals who have radically let go of their unsustainable biological and physiological dependencies and have connected to each other in selfless love.

Let us understand the impermanence of physical life. Let us hope for the lasting joy of spiritual yearnings met. And create a world order where we do less and feel more; where we take less and give more, where we live less and die more – die to our egos, die to our physical needs and awaken to our spiritual selves.