What does a world worth living in look like?
When setting out to think about and envision a good world, it is necessary to not only understand the fundamental workings of society and the world, but also to create a way to measure success in achieving and building this world.
In this chapter we will explore a way to measure this while In the next chapter we will look at some of the fundamentals that make up societies.
A lot of the conversation around the state of our societies and what to improve revolves around the question of poverty. This definition is rooted in around the most basic, fundamental human needs like food, water and shelter while it largely ignores other aspects of the human nature.
Building on what Abraham Maslow described in his 1942 paper as a hierarchy of needs we can establish a new way of looking at poverty through this lens. In his framework he describes five layers of human needs and motivations, starting with the physiological needs layer which revolves around food, water and shelter. Building on this most fundamental layer the needs for safety aim at protecting the status quo of the physiological needs and secure them for ourselves as well as our loved ones. This leads to the third layer of the pyramid — the need for love and belonging. Once our safety needs are met, we strive for fulfilling relationships with people we love and who love us in return. But it does not stop there — we also want to be held in esteem by our communities as well as by ourselves, which is expressed in the fourth layer describing the need for esteem. Once we can contribute to our community in a way that is both meaningful to the community and to ourselves, we develop the need for self actualisation, the need for the expression of the wealth and beauty of our inner world which again both serves ourselves but also lets us serve the greater good.
While Maslow described these levels as building on top of each other in his first paper, he later added that these layers cannot be seen as discrete and independent from one another, but are interdependent and are correlated with all other layers.
It is also true that much criticism of this basic framework has been brought forward in the decades since its inception, but most of the differences between the alternatives are mostly academic in nature. For the purpose of building in the direction of a quantifiable measurement for creating a good world either of these frameworks can be used. I decided to use Maslow because his framework is the most well known.
Let us take a brief look at the levels from the perspective of this book:
While it is true that the most crucial and life-threatening poverty happens on the physiological needs layer, we can observe poverty on the other levels in modern society. One very current and prolific example is the the mental health crisis we are facing in western industrial nations. While there are many factors involved in creating a tipping point for such a crisis, it can be interpreted as poverty on the levels of safety, love and belonging, esteem and also self actualisation.
On the safety layer we cannot seem to make sense of what is happening with and in our world, of how our supposed leaders don’t seem to be able to solve the massive threats we are facing, how we are watching the climate collapse and nations fail with our hands bound and no power to change anything. Watching this, does not increase our feeling of safety — taking our fate in our own hands does.
At the same time our need for love and belonging is being compromised by a flood of self-marketing shows on our favourite social networking platforms. Again and again science shows that watching the fabricated images of the perfect lives of other people makes us feel lonely and depressed, even when and if we know that these images are fabricated and that they are a cry for help by lonely and depressed people. Liking their social media contributions does not sooth theirs or our pain. Spending time with our friends, sharing and listening does.
It becomes increasingly difficult to play a meaningful role in a society and world that is breaking apart on all levels. We are educating our children and young adults with methods and tools from the 19th century and feeding them information that is outdated and does not serve them. We know this and they definitely know it as well. But performing an act on a stage that is crumbling does not fulfil the need for esteem. Building a solid stage does.
When faced with a world that is falling apart self actualisation is the furtherest from our mind unless we use it as a distraction. But even in this case, we know it is so and feel the emptiness.
As a framework of thinking about the world we can now look at the human condition of poverty or wealth on the five levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and we can decide to create a world in which all humans are equally wealthy on all these layers.
Of course, this will mean different things to different people, of course this is subject to cultural differences and of course there will be relative differences across regions of the world. But it allows us to not only draw an image of a world we want to live in, it also gives us a system of measuring success in creating this image.
It also allows us to let go of our current models of looking at the world and how we run our societies because it gives us a new perspective into the way we operate. This perspective makes it very obvious to us that we are spending a large portion of our energy, human and otherwise on a small portion of the human condition.
To put this into a vivid image, I like to describe this using Pareto’s principle by saying that we use 80% of our capacity to fulfil 20% of our needs. In other words, most of our efforts in the world are focussed on trying to solve the physiological needs.
Let us aim for a world in which we use equal amounts of our energy and capacity on these five layers in order to make every human on the planet equally wealthy on all these layers.
