“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Do We Need a Hierarchy?
In 1943, the psychologist Abraham Mazlow introduced the world to what is now known as ‘Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs,’ cementing in our psyches, our educational systems, and our social structures the concept that humans cannot and will not achieve their full potential unless and until their basic bodily needs and safety needs are met.
Mazlow’s theory was grounded in the idea that human nature is basically good, and what prevents humans from being good is a lack of stability in their environment. If I have to worry about whether I have food, water, and safety, then I won’t be able to form positive relationships with family and make new friends, much less develop a healthy self-esteem, set and achieve goals, or earn the respect of others and show them respect in return.
Once I have my own basic needs met, I can concentrate on social relationships. And once I can function in society, then I am finally ready to realize my full potential, find a purpose, and contribute creatively. Mazlow believed that the primary reason for basic needs in the hierarchy being left unfulfilled was due to external factors.
As such, according to this world view, we are for the most part merely products of our environment and victims of circumstance. If society could just find a way to meet everyone’s basic needs, there would be no crime, no suffering, no injustice, no war.
This is a lie.
To Be Frankl
Three years after Mazlow’s paper, Viktor Frankl gave voice to the truth in his book Man’s Search for Meaning. In what could not have painted a starker contrast to Mazlow, both in world view and experiential conviction, Frankl enunciated that the ability to find meaning in one’s life was the most import aspect to survival, not the end result of having been fortunate enough to survive.
In Mazlow’s world, meaning is what’s made possible after acting in self-interest. For Frankl, self-transcendence opens us up to meaning and purpose, which provide the motivating force from which everything else flows, including creativity, values, attitudes, happiness, and success.
Frankl calls for, not a universal provision of basic need, but a radical shift from consciousness-of-self to consciousness-of-meaning as the way people can be lifted up out of the dark pit of despair to more fertile and hopeful ground. Frankl came to this realization from within the deepest, darkest pit of despair imaginable, the Nazi concentration camps.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which remains popular in areas of business, government, and education as a way to understand human motivations and development, seems to make sense intuitively. After all, a person who is starving is likely to care more about finding some food than about working on intimacy issues.
As Mazlow articulated it, “It is quite true that man lives by bread alone — when there is no bread. But what happens to man’s desires when there is plenty of bread and when his belly is chronically filled?”[1]
Maslow infantilizes human beings, reducing them to bundles of bodily needs to be attended to before demanding anything that remotely approaches responsibility, much less self-actualization. Frankl not only treated adults like adults, he founded a field of psychotherapy to harness and therapeutically administer the power of searching for meaning.
In the face of the evil of Naziism and in a world that had only recently gotten over its fascination with eugenics (and let us all pray it is not making a comeback), Frankl’s message was that life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones, and that no one can take away our freedom to find meaning.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Not Bread, but God’s Word
In the battle between these two humanistic psychologists, Mazlow and Frankle, the Bible sides with Frankl. Indeed, when placed next to Scripture, Mazlow’s pyramid crumbles; from dust to dust, as it were.
While Mazlow had the foresight to anticipate that his detractors might recite the passage from Deuteronomy 8:3, that ‘man shall not live on bread alone,’ he forgets the second half of the statement as well as the context in which it is referred to again in the gospel of Matthew.
As Matthew recounts, Satan tempts Jesus in the desert, challenging Him to demonstrate His power by transforming stone to bread. Jesus replies, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”[2]
It’s as if Satan was saying, you gave manna to the Israelites wandering in the desert, you multiplied the few loaves and fishes to feed the thousands, why not go the next step and end hunger for good? But Christ knows that our most basic needs are spiritual, not physiological, and that He is the manna sent from Heaven, the bread of life that nourishes eternally.
Accordingly, our most basic need is to establish and deepen a relationship with God through the salvation won by Jesus Christ. For that salvation freed us from sin and death, which are our inherited nature, but not our intended nature.
It is not unmet physiological needs that depraves our innate goodness, like Mazlow believed, but rather it is through accepting Christ that we are able to discard sinfulness and live a life of purpose and meaning.
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God — what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Romans 12:2 NRSV-CI
St. Paul often wrote about how his strength came first from God, not from his bodily needs being met. He said, “I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”[3]
Trust in God
For St. Paul, no deficiency along the Mazlow hierarchy, whether physiological, health and safety, love and belonging, or esteem and autonomy, was a barrier to his relationship with Christ.
“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’ So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”
2 Corinthians 12:9-10 NRSV-CI
Becoming more like Christ is our path toward actualization, not some self-satisfying steps along a hierarchy. One who loves like Christ seeks to fulfill the needs of others first, putting one’s own needs last.
“Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself….”
Philippians 2:3-7 NRSV-CI
The Biblical view is that true human needs are best ordered not according to Maslow’s hierarchy but to God. As Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount, trust in God because He will provide.
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?”
Matthew 6:25-27 NRSV-CI
Neither Beasts nor Kings
Much of the world follows the prescripts of Maslow, looking for the fulfillment of human needs through earthly things, and always left wanting more. To those who have read Ecclesiastes, it is unsurprising that a life spent pursuing earthly treasures, even successfully beyond all desire, will be ultimately looked back upon as mere vanity.[4]
The truth that Mazlow could never see is that finding satisfaction in Christ is available to all regardless of what they lack in earthly fulfillment. “But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”[5]
Why are we giving this Mazlow fellow such a hard time when we are supposed to be talking about the power of paradox? The answer is straightforward, although complex.
Mazlow’s rubric exemplifies the general attitude modern humans have toward life: that we, like all animals subject to adaptive evolution, are driven by genetically ingrained needs and desires, and by fulfilling those needs and desires we set out on a path of development that leads to personal enlightenment.
Modern society recognizes that scientific prowess demonstrates that our intellectual potential as a species is virtually unlimited, as is our ability to improve our lives and societies through better design and ever-advancing technology.
This is Secular Gnosticism–a doctrine that rests all hope on the ‘progress’ of human knowledge while denying the presence of any divine spark within us.
Through such a world view, humanity simultaneously declares kinship with the basest creatures and the mightiest kings, bestowing on itself a sort of double-edged sword of Damocles that, with one stroke, severs the tissue joining us to God and the tissue joining us to our own souls.
Paradox has the power to help us avert our gaze from the world so we can look both beyond and within; to beat the Damocles sword into a plowshare that we can use to prepare good soil in our hearts–soil ready for accepting the seeds of truth; and so beginning to heal those lacerations.
[1] Maslow, A. H., A theory of human motivation, Psychological Review, 50 (4), 370-96
[2] Matthew 4:4 KJV
[3] Philippians 4:12-13 NRSV-CI
[4] For example, “So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem; also my wisdom remained with me. Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them; I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had spent in doing it, and again, all was vanity and a chasing after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 2:9-11 NRSV-CI
[5] Matthew 6:33 NRSV-CI