Need – The Force Behind Understanding
Post #5 in a series seeking to answer "What is Understanding made of?"
“People with intelligence must use their intelligence, people with eyes must use their eyes, people with the capacity to love have the impulse to love and the need to love in order to feel healthy. Capacities clamor to be used, and cease in their clamor only when they are used sufficiently. That is to say, capacities are needs.”
- Abraham Maslow, psychologist famous for his Hierarchy of Needs
“Understanding” is our conscious assessment of how things fit together, of how the world works and of what our own role is within it. It derives from models that we build. But why do we bother? It’s not just because we can build models of understanding, it is because we need to. Every need we feel is like hunger, distracting us from our lives until we satisfy it.
Human needs are numerous and often involve combinations of our physical, emotional and spiritual selves. These needs fuel the strength of our desire to adapt to whatever environments (niches) confront us. Sometimes they even create a desire to change those environments. Because our needs can be powerful, looking at them can expose us to dark and scary places… and scary spaces can slow us down. Perhaps that is why it often seems, as Mark Twain said, “All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.”
Once in my teenage years after experiencing a cold rejection from a popular girl I had asked out, I confided to a close friend, “What I fear is that my desires (to be liked, to have a girlfriend) are becoming my needs.” My friend cajoled, “Gosh, that’s deep. And that’s your problem. Get out of your head. Girls at the start just want to have fun. What you really need is to learn how to have fun. Dating a shrink is not something you would want to do, is it?” “It depends,” I replied, ”if she’s pretty.”
Psychologists, marketers and politicians who have studied motivation often frame their work around Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. He believed that an individual’s motivation lies somewhere along the height of a pyramid. The closer to the base of the pyramid we find ourselves, the stronger (more instinctual) our motivation to act. Thus those who want to motivate us to do something for them eventually create conditions that push us closer to this base where our deepest seated emotions, our survival instincts, reside. When conditions force us to focus attention on our most basic needs, it becomes easier to ignore the higher callings of humanity.
In studying the types of models that people use to help them understand their place in the world, and looking at how tightly they hold onto their selected models even in the face of irrelevance, I began to surmise that there must be a parallel hierarchy that deals not with the contents of our needs, but with how we choose models to fill them. This hierarchy appears to be built up as follows.
Hierarchy of HOW we satisfy our needs
At the base level we tend to act instinctively like infants or animals with no need for complex understanding. We will take what we feel we need in any way we can. We will suckle on anything that comes by our mouths. We will cry if something does not feel right. We throw a lot of signals out into the world with an instinctual hope that someone or something somewhere will respond.
But after a few minutes of random outbursts, our minds kick in. We begin to become aware of patterns that give us advantage; e.g. we may find our needs are filled faster if we cry a certain way. As these patterns are validated from repeat performances, we store them in our brains and eventually use them without further thinking. At this point we are squarely in Tier 2.
In Tier 3 our consciousness grows and we become aware that others satisfy similar needs in different ways; we also begin to experience new feelings. First we may become aware that our identity is tied to the models we have adopted (or the sports team that we follow). Second, we may get confused that the world doesn’t reveal its truths to everybody in the same way. Third we may fear that if other approaches are better than the ones we use, we could be put at a disadvantage. And fourth we may decide to fight to protect ourselves from these perceived threats to identity and wealth. Those stuck in Tier 3 begin to exhibit mental inertia.
But there will also be people who reject inertia and who begin to acknowledge that the models they have adopted may not always be the best. Many of these people then experience Tier 4 where a person explores alternate models with zest, and if they find a new approach that gives them more advantages than before, holds onto that one tightly and rejects the old views completely. It becomes like a rebirth, but one experienced more consciously than the first time around.
Finally at the highest level in this proposed “pyramid of understanding,” a person recognizes that all models are only simplifications and representations of reality. At this level we realize and appreciate the irony of needing to develop and use models while at the same time not taking any of them too seriously. I think that is what the Dalai Lama means when he talks about “holding too tightly onto anything” as being the main barrier to true happiness.
Apathy is a roadside motel that travelers up the “pyramid of understanding” often stop in. You find it after turning off the highway you were raised to travel on and before finding a road that suits you better. It resides in the netherworld between Tiers 3 and 4, and entering it can feel like not being in the world at all. Those who have been hurt deeply by someone they loved or who lost a career that they also loved, know what I am talking about.
Luckily when your need for connection begins to burn again, when staying at the Apathy Motel stops providing comfort, you are ready to grow. By developing new models in which you can love and be loved, or new models in which you can contribute to the world in different ways, you become free… free from having to follow just one path, free to play multiple roles, free to go down whatever road is most right for you at any moment. That is, the more paths you explore, the more likely you will find the truth called “understanding.” [Sorry Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, but you will never be free until you begin to see the beauty in those who believe differently than you.]
Next Post
Tags: Maslow Hierarchy, Needs, Understanding
Understanding | Stan Kaczmarek | 12 November 2009 |
