From Morality to Survival

What happens in a Recession

Back in the old days of psychology, there was this popular idea known as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It was created by psychologist Abraham Maslow and had a cool, pyramid-type shape. Here’s a version I found online…

The fundamental idea is that, as we achieve basic survival needs, so we start to achieve social needs, thence love needs and finally self-actualisation needs.

It looks great, which is no doubt why it was so popular. What I find particularly exciting about this model is that it implies that if we all just keep getting our basic needs met, then we will all finally get enlightened and live in peace, wealth and happiness.

Maslow’s Hierarchy model was created around the time of the Second World War, when few people worldwide were really in a position to ascend far up the pyramid. Thus it came to, in a sense, justify the wealth-creating, trickledown culture of the post-war world, dominated by US capitalism.

I guess, sometime around the seventies, we entered a period when we might check out if Maslow’s Hierarchy were really true. The indicators looked good. Rich Californians were getting into meditation and Eastern gurus. The world was visibly getting less warlike and more peaceful.

But, fast forward four or five more decades, and have we all become enlightened? Do we all live in peace with each other, having respect for each others views?

Hardly!

I think Maslow’s Hierarchy was great and inspirational for its time. But it was extremely optimistic! For many people, having their basic physical and social needs met very evidently does not leave them focusing on how to be more loving or become self-actualised. Rather they prefer distractions, safety and comfort.

Being a therapist who is also interested in finance and geopolitics, not long ago I came across the following model. It was created by someone using the pseudonym FOFOA and illustrates one way that the development of financial systems over periods of stability might be described.

It shows how the financial system, as it grows, moves from furnishing basic human needs to creating increasingly abstract monetary vehicles for investors to profit from.

I thought “wow,” not just because it seemed so accurate. Rather because, intuitively, it seemed to me to transcend Maslow’s Hierarchy, and replace it with something more likely and realistic.

Instead of deepening human values, as we move out of the “survival phase” of acquiring money, many humans simply find ways to protect what they’ve got and increase it still further. This happens on both a personal and an institutional level.

FOFOA’s model inspired me to come up with something similar on a psychological level, to replace Maslow’s Hierarchy. It runs something like this:

We start, at the bottom, with the most core survival need - to stay alive today - and gradually work our way up to some sense of individual and social stability. At some point, our sense of personal selfhood becomes more fixed, at the level marked “Ego.”

What then seems to happen, for most people, is that they seek to protect and expand their wealth and comfort. Simultaneously, they begin to subscribe to progressive visions of how the world “should be.” This might possibly be to justify the fact that they have a great deal more money than many other people, a way to reduce any underlying sense of guilt, or for some other reason I haven’t yet figured out.

I think what I’m trying to say here is that deepening love and self-awareness is by no means a “done deal.” It does not just happen automatically, once our basic needs are met. Something more needs to take place.

In trying to figure this part out, I’m reminded of the process that I went through during the eight years of intense group therapy that I undertook to heal my life. It was like my existing, dysfunctional sense of self - the inverted pyramid - was constantly being bashed down and allowed to regrow, each new incarnation slightly improved upon the last.

Does humanity itself need a similar process to grow? Because it does seem to me that the mindset each of us forges, after adolescence, is like an inverted pyramid that can benefit from being worked on.

And might that process be facilitated by our going through repeated financial recessions?

I placed the two double-pyramid models side-by-side.

As times get harder, and money more scarce, so the ego we have formed and our notion of values and how the world should be comes under increasing pressure. Survival needs and, importantly, survival emotions, re-enter our lives. We have more pressing concerns than mapping out our own perfect world. We are compelled to fixate on core needs.

I think that, whilst gruelling, this is a healthy process. The emotions that re-enter our mind - fear, anger, pain, love - are core emotions, that we need to be in contact with in order to have a healthy psychological life, regardless of our wealth.

I think that recessions may provide a healthy process through which societies can develop. To my mind, they are certainly better than the world wars that marked the last century. Our culture does need a mechanism through which some of the natural immaturities of our ego can be bashed out, like a blacksmith working metal. I think if a critical threshold of people can come to realise that which is truly of value to them in life, then a much better world can really start to take shape.