Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Was Incomplete

Maslow couldn't see the culture right in front of him.

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon - and Abraham Maslow. It’s closer than you think.

I wrote earlier this week about how Maslow’s hierarchy of needs had a profound effect on me in my early years. I discovered Maslow’s hierarchy of needs when I was eleven years old. Understanding that hierarchy as an eleven-year-old made me feel that I was enlightened; like I knew something most other people didn't.

I didn't know the whole story.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a very useful tool. However, I had never considered that it comes from a very distinct worldview with its own assumptions and biases. That doesn’t make it wrong or evil, just incomplete. I only recently learned how incomplete.

In 1938, Maslow traveled to Northern Alberta, Canada where one of four Blackfoot (also known as the Siksika) Nations is located. This was the traditional territory of the Blackfoot Nation. Maslow spent six weeks with the Blackfoot Nation as part of his research.

Analysis of his work shows that he really didn’t understand their ways of knowing.  It appears that Maslow may have been influenced by the Blackfoot. Later in his life, he questioned his hierarchy, but it does not appear he based his hierarchy on their worldview.

A common criticism of Maslow’s hierarchy is that it is rather individualistic, and comes from an individual-centered society, not a collective-focused society.

Maslow found the Blackfoot “a very generous people” and said, “They seem definitely not to have any major anxieties or repressed aggression.” These were things he was expecting, because they were prominent in the world he came from, and he found it odd that a culture could be less anxious and less aggressive than what he had known from his previous experiences. Maslow describes their society as unusual. From his point of view, it was.

Maslow experienced the Blackfoot people from a very Euro-centric point of view. He didn’t come out and say that their culture was inferior, but by calling it unusual he seems to be categorizing it as something “less than” his own.

I’m not being overly critical of Maslow. He was a man of his time, and I’m not surprised by the reactions of a white man in an Indigenous culture 80 years ago being one of misunderstanding and bemusement. He isn’t dismissive of the Blackfoot people. He liked and admired them. But he didn’t seem to get it. He didn’t seem to understand that the Blackfoot way of looking at the world could be superior to his in some ways or could lead to better outcomes. Maslow’s perspective was narrow. He had not had many cultural experiences outside of European traditions.

He didn’t understand their culture.

It looks like he may have understood them better later in life, but we will get to that. First, let’s learn more about the Blackfoot worldview.

What Maslow missed.

Maslow came from a European capitalist culture, and he had entered an indigenous cooperative culture. Many of the concepts that Maslow brought with him, that he was looking to test in his work, such as competition and self-worth, were looked at completely differently by the Blackfoot Nation.

The stories of Maslow’s time with the Blackfoot Nation paint him as a bit of a pushy guest who was tolerated and accommodated. His questioning of people about their lives, especially women and adolescents, was often seen as impolite and intrusive. He seemed so intent on getting answers to support his assumptions, that he missed most of what the Blackfeet were about.

Where Maslow’s hierarchy was eventually represented by a pyramid (but not by Maslow himself, the pyramid came after he died), the lives of the Blackfeet and many other indigenous peoples would better be represented by a circle – which represents the community, with individuals as just one point among many interconnecting relationships and dependencies within that circle. The Blackfeet realized how interdependent they were, those dependencies were seen as strengths, not weaknesses. Often in Western cultures, the opposite is thought to be true.

All lives in the community are connected, and a problem with one person is seen not as that individual's problem or neurosis, but as something that impacts the whole community. Actions are taken or not taken largely to serve the community, not to serve the ego, or an individual want.

While he was with the Blackfeet, Maslow seemed to have missed the Blackfoot Nation's way of knowing and interacting with each other. From Maslow’s perspective, we work our whole lives to reach self-actualization. For the Blackfoot people, a child is born already self-actualized. They don’t need to become a whole person – they are already considered as complete as they need to be. They have nothing more to “prove” or “achieve”. The society they are born into is the most important thing, not how they can somehow become “whole” or “right” later in life. That kind of mindset Maslow brought with him breeds more Western concepts of self-doubt and insecurity that seemed to be a foreign concept to the Blackfoot nation.

Maslow found that the Blackfoot people tended to be happier and more sanguine. They weren’t concerned with being “good enough”. They were good enough when they were born. They entered society as a fully formed person, who were immediately seen as part of the “we” of the collective, not an individual who would have to find their way in the world and prove to themselves their own self-actualization.

 The Blackfoot way isn’t a utopia.

I’m not trying to paint the Blackfoot way of life, or the way of life of Indigenous people, as superior to Western ways of knowing or living. It is just different. I think there are parts of it that are superior, that we should adopt, or borrow – the collective being more important than the whole, for instance.

The lack of individualism in such a culture would rub many people the wrong way. It would rub me the wrong way. I can’t imagine living in a society where I knew everyone, and everyone knew me. The lack of privacy and lack of individualism is very foreign to me. I was raised to celebrate the things that are unique about me, the “gifts” or “skills” that I have. I try to raise my children in the same way.

There are blind spots in society like the Blackfoot, just as there are in the Western culture that I know best.

But a major blind spot we have in the West is that we tend to defer to the individual over the benefit of the many. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The person who thinks differently often drives progress, shakes things up, and often for the better. New ways of thinking have led to medical, scientific, and cultural breakthroughs that most Western cultures celebrate.

But we need not always defer to this instinct. There is a balance between the Western way where progress is the guiding light, and the indigenous community in which what is best for the collective is the decision rule.

There must be a middle ground in which we encourage individual expression and new ways of thinking, but not to the extent that the rights of the individual jeopardize the survival of the community.

That is where we are now.

Our Western culture nearly always defers to progress and the individual. That isn’t a big deal in most cases. But when that individual is a corporate person who gets subsidies and legal protections to burn fossil fuels, and their rights override the rights of the collective to not have the quality of their lives permanently diminished – we have a problem.

Bring it back to Kevin Bacon.

I can see the objection to deferring to the community. It goes something like this:

It is always those who want to block progress that hold us back, and such people will say that anything they object to is hurting the collective.

I got this.

Surely we can differentiate between Kevin Bacon’s character, Ren McCormack, in the 1984 film Footloose, who was fighting for the right to dance in a conservative small town - and the existential threat of climate change. Letting Ren dance is not the same as subsidies for oil and gas companies. (For those of you too young to know that movie reference, for the love of God, do not watch the remake. Go to the original. It is worth your while).

We must understand when it makes sense to defer to the rights of the individual (in most cases) and when to defer to the rights of the collective (existential threats).

We should also try to better understand the wisdom there is in the Blackfoot point of view. If Indigenous people had been in charge of North America for the last 400 years, we likely would not have many of the advances in human society that we cherish today, but we likely wouldn’t have the existential crisis of climate change.

A society that puts the “we” first, likely wouldn’t have gotten into this mess.

Maslow realized he got it wrong.

Toward the end of his life, Maslow thought he should adjust his model. He realized that self-actualization shouldn’t be the zenith of the human condition, but that self-transcendence should.

Unfortunately, Maslow had a heart attack and later died in 1967 soon after writing in his journals about self-actualization and self-transcendence. In his own words:

“The goal of identity [self-actualization] seems to be simultaneously an end-goal in itself, and also a transitional goal, a rite of passage, a step along the path to the transcendence of identity. … If our goal is the Eastern one of ego-transcendence and obliteration, of leaving behind self-consciousness and self-observation, … then it looks as if the best path to this goal for most people is via achieving identity, a strong real self, and via basic-need-gratification.”

Note that Maslow doesn’t get to the point that the Blackfeet does, that a person is already self-actualized at birth. However, he eventually gets to a similar place. Maslow eventually got around to understanding that the pinnacle of human experience is to belong to something bigger than oneself. Something that he feels we can get to “after” getting to self-actualization. Maslow sees self-transcendence as the cherry on top of a long climb toward and through self-actualization.

The Blackfeet feel you are born that way.

I prefer the Blackfeet way. It seems like a lot less work.

If someone could have explained that to that eleven-year-old me, that would have been helpful.

A society that values society over the individual has its benefits.

We have learned to defer to the individual. Our incentives are set up to defer to the individual. Our economy is set up to defer to the individual. And that's fine to a point. But when that deference to the individual harms the whole, we must change the way we do things.

We are told that if we change things so we consume less, produce less, and use less energy we will go back to a dark time. We are told that it is only the individual striving for a better life that moves the economy forward. We are told that the individual striving for more moves our lives forward and helps produce the growth that we need to survive.

These things aren’t true. We can consume less and be fine. We don’t need our economies to grow to live fulfilling lives. We don’t need economic growth to survive and thrive.

We need the collective to look out for the benefit of everyone. We need structures such as a collective to ensure we don't put the rights of the individual above the needs of the many if the rights of the individual hurt the needs of the many. Again, we can't conflate natural disagreements or our cultural differences to be seen as threats to the collective. Ren McCormick wanting to dance in small-town America is not a threat to civilization. Existential threats to the collective are rare, but climate change is one of them. Overshooting the planetary boundaries is one of them. We have created cultures in a society that are not equipped to deal with climate change because there is no voice of the collective.

Governments that should fulfill this function of representing the collective are captured by individuals; be those corporations or wealthy individuals who can buy influence and lobby governments to do what is best for those individuals. That's the fundamental problem here.

There is a happy medium between a society where the desires of the individual win out over everything else and one in which everyone is just a small part of the greater whole. What we need now is more collectivism to tackle this problem. That doesn't mean we throw away our societies and move to completely collective existences.

Opponents of what I'm talking about may try to fearmonger with words like socialism and communism. But that's not what this is. The Blackfoot and other indigenous peoples around the world aren't communist in the sense that we understand. But they understand that the good of society and the good of the community do need to come first. We have operated under the fiction that unlimited rights for every individual add up to a better society in many Western cultures.

We need to find a way to put the needs of society, the community, the civilization first when the threat is an existential one. That is going to take people coming together and agreeing that such a model is needed.

What does that look like? There’s a word for that: Solidarity.

That’s what I’ll be talking about next.

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