I started writing these columns in 2017.
It is safe to assume that readers have watched my trajectory over the past few years. I survived becoming too subjective in my meanderings. Yet the time has come for me to place myself in the centre of the discourse because I have reached my tolerance parameters.
Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist who devised the hierarchical needs model in a paper published in the journal Physiological Reviews, in 1943.
Most of my readers are familiar with the pyramid that places the needs in ascending order, starting with the lowest needs (psychological) to the highest, that of self-actualisation.
It appears that the needs are stacked in a way that requires fulfilment on one level before one can move to another. This is a fallacy because Maslow never produced a drawing of a pyramid. By inference, we can deduce that the interchange between levels of gratification is never linear or chronological.
Indeed, the needs are universally accepted as real, but circumstances, curricular needs, political agendas and the general ebb and flow of human fortunes should caution us that movement between various stages is fluid, unpredictable, reversible and never static.
Where does my veiled threat of subjective writing enter? Right here, where we see that Maslow did not really devise the natural instincts for survival with which all creatures are born.
Also, if one has a domain-specific application, the model of needs, which starts with the psychological, then safety and security, then love and belonging, then self-esteem, and ends on self-actualisation is, in fact, a natural series of behavioural imperatives that does not only serve as a design for a happy society, but develops its own relevances based on a universal need that encapsulates these silos or categories.
The question begs. If we have such a keen awareness of what the average Joe wants from life, we can explain strategy, inventiveness, prioritising, and even ideology. And, as fellow travellers on this little ball of water on which we live, we do not need rocket science to agree that each of these expectations should be met, if only on the grounds that it provides for our one commonality; we are all members of the race called homo sapiens.
We are all people with expectations, fears, disappointments, hopes and dreams, and the reality of the pain of disappointment.
Transfer this template which has been interrogated at the most basic level to any society, and one can instantly assess the success level of the societal satiation of natural-born expectations from this roller-coaster ride called life.
The flash-points come when ideology collides with available resources, or when plain pig-headedness (and I include shape) impede the natural acceptance of one’s right to fair treatment in the one swing around the mulberry bush.
From here on in it is a fact that some societies succeed according to the focus on a level, or a compendium of views tailored to construe productive fair mindedness. Or one can identify national cohesion by the collective wills as revealed by the many areas of application, such as sociology, anthropology, history, art, warfare, and industrialisation.
In a word, Maslow’s hierarchy could well tell us what the needs are, but the levels he explores could quite easily become spurs to prick the sides of national imperatives.
So where have we arrived now? How well are we doing in serving these internationally accepted norms of expectation, and the concomitant buy-ins and behaviours that makes one nation successful tennis players, others great scientists, other great aesthetes and creative creatures, and yet other great gastronomes?
It is a short leap to ask why I, as a classified coloured person, have been greyed out of the Rainbow Nation. Why are my needs reduced to a nuisance level, even after I have performed with great success in my task of bringing something to the table?
The answer, my friend, is not blowing in the wind, despite the Nobel prize-winning Bob Dylan. The answer lies elsewhere. That is the pitch of this week’s subjective slant. Could this become a conversation?
* Alex Tabisher.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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