A belated attention

详细摘要

According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, set out by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1943 and elaborated in his 1954 book Motivation and ...

According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, set out by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1943 and elaborated in his 1954 book Motivation and Personality, human beings move through their needs in stages: As each is satisfied, they advance to the next. The pyramid begins with the physiological. No one can entertain a wish of any kind while under the shadow of hunger and thirst, or without shelter. Next come the needs of safety, from physical security to the stability of family life, and then the social needs: Belonging, being seen to matter to another person, and spending time with them in the making of the memories a life is built from.

Maslow’s pyramid seems sound, and to hold for every kind of person, wherever they live. What differs entirely is that some are born, through no choice of their own, into circumstances that oblige their lives to revolve around securing their daily bread, or that make their furthest dream a house in which to live with a wife and children. Such people are, by human instinct, whether latent or evident, ready to surrender everything that lies higher up the pyramid.

Some people live beneath the ceiling of the day’s bread. I do not say “beneath the poverty line”, for that phrase has lost its force beside the squalid conditions endured by whole communities in every corner of the earth. Modern technology, from satellite television to videos on social media, now shows us at every moment the plight of people who ask for nothing more than a morsel for themselves and their children, and a roof against the winter cold and the wrath of the scorching summer sun. They do not dream of stars. They dream of a wall that does not let the water through, and of a single night in which their children sleep without one of them saying: “Mama, I’m hungry!”

It seems to me that Maslow catalogued human needs from a natural, humane standpoint, but one born in a calm and settled economy, and that he did not step far enough back to see the wars and hunger that…

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