He was writing to proclaim that humankind "has a higher nature and that this is part of its essence-- or more simply, that human beings can be wonderful out of their own human and biological nature.
He saw clearly as anyone the indisputable evidence that human nature is capable of every conceivable kind of violence, viciousness, and cruelty. He was also, from his early youth, a very astute observer of those evils of everyday life that surface routinely in ordinary social interaction: belittlement, slander, guile, deception, manipulation, exploitation, extortion, oppression -- the list could go on and on and still barely scratch the surface.Sigmund Freud once observed, somewhat cynically, that "each of us will be well advised, on some suitable occasion, to make a low bow to the deeply moral nature of mankind; it will help us to be generally popular and much will be forgiven us for it." This "deeply moral nature" of humankind is precisely what Maslow was aiming at throughout the whole span of his work. At the heart of the larger and more wonderful conception of human nature that had been growing within him since the early days of his youth was a deep belief-- in spite of all appearances to the contrary-- that "people are all decent underneath". When people appear to be something other than good and decent, it is only because they are reacting to stress, pain, or the deprivation of basic needs such as security, love and self-esteem.
At the heart of the theory of motivation lay two observations. First, we rarely if ever achieve a state of motivational quiescence; in virtually every waking moment, we are host to one motive or another, even though some motives might be so faint as to be scarcely noticed. Moreover, as soon as one motive is satisfied, another immediately "pops up to take its place," as though it had been lurking behind the scenes all the while, just waiting for its opportunity to take center stage. When this next motive is satisfied, yet another moves in to replace it; and so on. The second observation was that these various motives do not succeed one another at random. The order of their succession is dictated by the fact that some motives are simply more biologically urgent, that is, more intense than others, and the intensity itself derives from the fact that they have a kind of built-in priority. In a word, human motives are hierarchically structured, and their arrangement within the hierarchy is defined by their respective levels of urgency/intensity/priority. As a convenient shorthand expression for these linked properties of urgency, intensity and priority, Maslow coined the term "prepotent", along with its noun form, "prepotency". In more general terms, when any two motives are demanding satisfaction at the same time, the more prepotent, the more biologically urgent and clamorous motive takes priority, and the less prepotent motive gets pushed back behind the scenes. Conversely, the expression of any particular motive --even one as patently basic as hunger-- presupposes that all greater prepotent needs have already been fairly well satisfied, at least for the time being. The broader implication that Maslow saw in this hierarchical arrangement of motives went straight back to the question of higher human motives. The orthodox theory had dismissed all such motives as being secondary and derivative because they did not express themselves universally within the species.
With his vision of hierarchical arrangement, Maslow now had a psychologically tenable basis for explaining how a higher human motive, such as a desire for beauty, could be every bit as basic and built into human nature as the need for food, eventhough it is regularly and strongly expressed in only a relatively small portion of the species. He extended the explanation to include love, justice, kindness, and all the other items that one might want to list among the higher human motives. The fact that these higher motives do not appear as universally as the more clamorous motives of hunger, thirst, and the like, does not mean that they are merely secondary and derivative; it means only that they are less prepotent. We would "never have the desire to compose music or create mathematical systems, or to adorn our homes," or to seek beauty in any other way, "if our stomachs were empty most of the time, or if we were continually dying of thirst, or if we were continually threatened by an always impending catastrophe.."
But, give any particular person, or people in general, freedom from hunger and thirst and threat of impeding catastrophe -- that is, satisfy all of the more prepotent motives-- and the higher human motives will come to the fore and take their turn on stage. Have they only now come into existence? No; they have been there all the while. They are rooted deeply in the very core of human nature, but, heretofore they have been eclipsed by the more biologically urgent motives.
Although the levels of basic needs mentioned up to this point are very diverse, ranging from the sheer gut-drives of hunger, thirst, and so on, up through the more distinctively human needs for love and self-esteem, they all have one very important characteristic in common: They are all needs for something; they are motivational dynamisms activated by deficiency. All such deficiency motives have in common the fact that they color our perceptions of reality. They also distort our dealings with reality by causing us to make demands on it: "Feed me! Love me! Respect me!" The greater our need for food or safety or affection or self-esteem, the more we will see and treat the items of reality, including ourselves and other people, in accordance with their respective abilities to facilitate or obstruct the satisfaction of that need.
Suppose, now, that we were able to find a person for whom all the basic deficiency motives had become well and stably satisfied. What would be the characteristics of such a person? Such a person will no longer be making deficiency motivated demands on reality, and will no longer be driven by deficiency-motivated fears and suspicions. Hence, the interaction with oneself, with other persons, and with the world at-large will be more accepting, more capable of love and appreciation, and, over-all, just plain more enjoyable. This is the centermost part of what Maslow described as self-actualization, and it marks the point where an entirely different kind of motivation emerges in the life of the person. Up to this point, all motivation is deficiency motivation that expresses itself as a striving to acquire or attain whatever is defining the deficiency. What comes from this new level of motivation is not a striving but an unfolding of all those "wonderful possibilities" that, Maslow believed, were somewhere deep within the core of human nature all along.
And now he had his explanation for why these potentialities, presumed to be present in all human beings, manifest themselves in only a few. Most of us spend most of our lives in thrall to one or another of the more prepotent levels of deficiency motivation. The higher and distinctively human possibilities remain locked away, masked, eclipsed, unable to express themselves. Maslow gave us a brief composite description of what he envisioned as the characteristics of persons in whom this unfolding process is well underway. The basic outlines are published in Motivation and Personality and its extension Toward a Psychology of Being.
Body and Character
People with low self-esteem tend to be modest or bashful. Thus it is usual that many of them will either not appear in a swimming suit or will feel very self-conscious if they do. One girl, however, definitely low in self-esteem, was not only observed at the beach in a swimming suit, but in one that was definitely scanty and revealing. Later a series of interviews revealed that she was very proud of her body, which she considered perfect-- an opinion which, for a woman of low self-esteem, is, like her behavior, very unusual. Through her report it was evident, however, that this attitude toward bathing was inconsistent in that she invariably felt self-conscious, that she always had a robe nearby to cover herself with, and that anyone staring at her too openly could drive her from the beach altogether. She had been convinced by various external opinions that her body was attractive, she felt intellectually that she ought to behave a certain way about it, tried very hard to behave in this way, but found it difficult to do so because of her character structure.
Values in Society
Whether character education can take place in the classroom, whether books, lectures, catechisms, and exhortations are the best tools to use, whether sermons and Sunday schools can produce good human beings, or rather, whether the good life produces the good person, whether love, warmth, friendship, respect, and good treatment of the child are more consequential for later character structure--these are the alternatives presented by adherence to one or the other theory of character formation and of education.
Living the wisdom of TAO
Assumption that 'people are healthy and therefore are good choosers' makes the environment conducive for healthy people to attain their natural place and also facilitates healthy growth of others because only healthy people fit best in such an environment. But for a person to make such assumption the person has to be strong.
I AM BECOME STRONG
What if the organism is seen as having "biological wisdom"? If we learn to give it greater trust as autonomous, self-governing, and self-choosing, then clearly we must shift our image over to a more Taoistic one. This is the one word that I can think of that summarizes succinctly the many elements of the image of the more humanistic scientist. Taoistic means asking rather than telling. It means nonintruding, noncontrolling. It stresses noninterfering observation rather than a controlling manipulation. It is receptive and passive rather than active and forceful. It is like saying that if you want to learn about ducks, then you had better ask the ducks instead of telling them. So also for human children. In prescribing "what is best for them" it looks as if the best technique for finding out what is best for them is to develop techniques for getting them to tell us what is best for them.
"I pay attention to my inner callings.
I live in accordance with nature and therefore
never go against the way of things.
I work at allowing all others to trust
in their highest nature rather than
imposing my rules and regulations on them."
-- Translation of verses from Tao Te Ching
The Greatest Ever
In this strategy, values occupy center stage, as it should, being literally the original source of all principles. Principles wove around values depending on circumstances, context and situation.
-- I V D Mahesh
