Geek Heresy (27 page)

Maslow suggested that these needs – which everyone shares – were sorted by their urgency: “It is quite true the humans live by bread alone – when there is no bread. But what happens to their desires when there
is
plenty of bread and when their bellies are chronically filled?
At once other (and higher) needs emerge
and these, rather than physiological hungers, dominate the organism. And when these in turn are satisfied, again new (and still higher) needs emerge, and so on” (emphasis in original).
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As immediate hunger is satisfied, more security is sought; as security needs are satisfied, esteem becomes more important; as the need for esteem is satisfied, self-actualization becomes a stronger motivator.

Less understood is Maslow’s claim that people are “multimotivated” and that behavior is “multidetermined.” People have multiple needs at once, even if one might dominate. At any time, each of a person’s needs might be satisfied to different degrees: “It is as if the average citizen is satisfied perhaps 85 percent in physiological needs, 70 percent in safety needs, 50 percent in love needs, 40 percent in self-esteem needs, and
10 percent in self-actualization needs.”
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And any single behavior might be motivated by multiple needs. We work hard at our jobs because pay and benefits satisfy physiological needs, security needs, and esteem needs; the recognition for our work satisfies esteem needs; and, if the work is deeply interesting to us, it is an expression of self-actualization. Depending on the nature of the job, the reward package, and one’s attitudes, each of these components will have different weight.

Maslow Revisited

Maslow has had his critics, and they have questioned everything from the number and substance of his levels to their ordering, their individualistic focus, and their bias toward his own gender and culture.
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(Personally, I’m not convinced that Maslow’s “belonging needs” are a single level in the hierarchy as much as a set of needs that runs parallel to the others.) Some of these criticisms are valid, but many are based on a poor reading of Maslow.
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A truer understanding explains how individual intrinsic growth such as Awuah’s can happen.

One pervasive mistake is to see self-actualization as the top of the hierarchy.
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Maslow kept reworking the hierarchy throughout his life. He wondered, for example, whether esteem needs might be further broken down into two levels – one for public recognition and another for private achievement or mastery.
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And more relevant for Awuah, Maslow also realized that “self-actualization is not enough.” He gestured at an additional level that could be called
self-transcendence
.
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Self-transcendence tends toward “the good of other people,” toward egolessness and altruism.

Self-transcendence is essential to explaining Awuah’s evolution, because he didn’t stop with self-actualizing work. Awuah says that toward the latter half of his time at Microsoft, he felt a growing desire to contribute to the larger world. “The birth of my son as well as events in Africa” catalyzed his transition, he said, referring to the Rwandan genocide and the Somalian civil war. His life path shows the clear pull of self-transcendence overtaking needs for security, esteem, achievement, and self-actualization.

Yet another misreading of Maslow’s theory goes like this: Some people go on hunger strikes to protest injustice; their physiological needs don’t prevail over other motivations; so something must be wrong with the hierarchy.
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Actually, though, this example offers proof of something else. Maslow knew that there were both intrinsic and extrinsic causes of behavior and said that different people felt the pull of lower needs differently: “It is precisely those individuals in whom a certain need has always been satisfied who are best equipped to tolerate deprivation of that need in the future.”
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So Maslow’s hierarchy is actually two hierarchies. One – about the influence of external conditions on behavior – explains why most of us would prefer to go three days without self-actualizing work than three days without water. That’s the hierarchy of needs as it’s popularly understood. The other hierarchy – about intrinsic motivation – explains what allows some people to sacrifice lower needs for the sake of higher ones. A hunger striker puts self-transcendent goals ahead of survival needs. That shows a kind of maturity, an ability to suppress or ignore more urgent needs in the service of a larger aspiration. To distinguish this internal gradient from the external hierarchy of needs, I’ll refer to it as the
hierarchy of aspirations
.
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Maslow saw this internal growth as a good thing. He called it “character learning” or “intrinsic learning,” which is part and parcel of intrinsic growth.
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Improvements in intention, discernment, and self-control allow a person to act not just in pursuit of pressing, self-focused, short-term needs, but also toward longer-term outcomes that may enhance others’ well-being. At the lowest level are physiological aspirations, which are narrowly self-, present-, and material-focused. Someone operating primarily at this level sees the world as a raw fight for survival. That narrow focus is stretched with security aspirations, however, which are still self-focused but require some future planning and cooperation to obtain. Next come esteem and achievement aspirations, which begin to incorporate nonmaterial needs and further instill longer-term focus and the drive to cooperate.
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Still, these aspirations remain basically selfish, and selfishness continues all the way through self-actualization. In fact, self-actualization could be thought of as the
height of selfishness. Self-actualizers are most interested in ensuring their own long-term happiness – materially, intellectually, and emotionally. (This might be one reason why various studies suggest that today’s creative classes seem more narcissistic than ever.
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) But their selfishness is not like the selfishness of brutish survival – it can express itself as enlightened self-interest. Aspirants to self-actualization are often vocal in protecting universal freedoms, because they have both the slack and the desire to guarantee their own right to self-expression. Lastly, there are self-transcendent aspirations whose focus on self gives way to genuinely selfless concern for others. All the way through, intentions embrace larger and larger circles of humanity. With greater Maslovian development, people become more future-oriented, more other-oriented, and more other-oriented toward larger groups of people.

Awuah is a good example. He became less interested in esteem and self-actualization once he could take them for granted. Something internal changed as he learned new skills and grew more confident in his ability to excel in a satisfying career. Maslow suggested that these shifts happen when a need “has always been satisfied.” A more robust explanation, though, would be that shifts occur when a person feels thoroughly confident in being able to satisfy a need, either due to his or her own ability or through societal provision.
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In any case, it’s because Awuah is motivated mainly – though probably not solely – by higher needs that lower needs cease to exert strong pull. He has skipped many lunches for the sake of establishing a new university. He not only let go of a high-income career, but also spent much of his wealth on the cause. And, most telling, whatever sacrifice he felt – “I won’t lie to you – it was tough” to leave Microsoft, Awuah said – it didn’t get in the way of his new aspiration.
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In contrast, someone who aspires primarily to survival or security would not feel comfortable making Awuah’s tradeoffs. A shocking illustration is a story told to Kevin Bales, an expert on global slavery and president of the nonprofit Free the Slaves. An Indian couple who were locked in bonded labor came into an inheritance that allowed them to pay back a familial debt and buy their freedom. But then, the husband says: “We paid off our debt and were free to do whatever we wanted.
But I was worried all the time – what if one of the children got sick? What if our crop failed? What if the government wanted some money? Since we no longer belonged to the landlord, we didn’t get food every day as before. Finally, I went to the landlord and asked him to take me back. I didn’t have to borrow any money, but he agreed to let me be his [bonded plowman] again.”
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This couple had freedom, but then voluntarily returned to conditions of slavery for the sake of guaranteed food and security, proving the powerful pull of Maslow’s physiological and security needs when both are under systemic threat.
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Aspirations for achievement or esteem, let alone self-actualization and self-transcendence, are nowhere in sight. Some people seek greater income at the expense of a satisfying career; others don’t mind low pay if the job fulfills a deep creative urge. Some people are magnanimous only when they’re acknowledged for it; others are consistently generous, indifferent to recognition. These kinds of differences are explained by the hierarchy of aspirations.

One thing about the hierarchy is that it allows for the twisty evolution of aspirations. Take the example of some poor communities that pressure their members to share material goods. They make it difficult for individuals to accumulate wealth. This makes sense for collective survival in severe circumstances, but it can discourage private effort. A social norm that instead respects personal property rights can motivate individuals, and it encourages material growth. At some level of prosperity, though, selfish accumulation can lead to stark inequalities that strain the social fabric. Sharing once again becomes important, though perhaps in a less personal or communal way. Thus, intrinsic growth can be a climb with switchbacks: Progress means that sharing will give way to private ownership, which evolves into enlightened sharing. Similarly, people grow from dependence to independence to interdependence; from unwanted poverty to prosperity to contentment; from oppression to freedom to responsibility; from helplessness to confidence to humility. The qualitative changes inherent in the hierarchy allow a Hegelian back-and-forth that constantly strives for balance, synthesis, and maturation.

The climbing analogy helps clarify other points. First, the hierarchy doesn’t imply inexorable upward motion. It’s possible to regress, stagnate, or vacillate. At most, the hierarchy is a map, and maps by themselves don’t decide where people go. Also, the map says little about the flora and fauna you might encounter. The hierarchy of aspirations only captures one aspect of human personality relevant for social causes. The theory leaves everything else about our infinitely rich behavior unexplained and unconstrained.

Individuals also begin at different altitudes and climb at different speeds. Awuah was raised by parents who weren’t struggling for survival, so he took subsistence for granted – undeniably a more advantaged starting point than, say, Isaac Tuggun’s. Other people start with self-actualization as a given. They might proceed right into self-transcendence. This suggests that children raised to be comfortable with one set of aspirations can aspire for more. In a letter to his wife, John Adams, America’s second president, wrote: “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.”
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The progression goes from the hard and practical to the constructive and exploratory and eventually to the artistic and self-expressive.
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More than a century and a half before Maslow, Adams mapped out a path for his offspring from security to achievement, and from achievement to self-actualization.

Confronting the Tech Commandments

As I’ve worked with poor and marginalized communities, I’ve encountered a wide range of amazing people: alcoholic men who became virtual teetotalers after taking up meaningful work; an ostracized victim of gang rape who started an organization that rescued prostitutes; former ethnic antagonists who came together to build a hospital; an engineering graduate who moved to an impoverished village he supported for decades; and more than a few destitute nonprofit beneficiaries who
made a transition to capable and reasonably paid nonprofit staff. These personal metamorphoses aren’t frequent by any means, but neither are they altogether rare. When they occur, they signal an evolution like Agyare’s and Awuah’s. They’re accompanied by a surge of intrinsic growth. They inspire others. And they shine and shimmer against the inertness of packaged interventions.

What’s missing in today’s main paradigms of social change is any notion of intrinsic human progress. You might admire Tuggun and Sreenivasa for their ability to lead independent lives despite hard initial conditions. Or you might praise Agyare and Awuah for their larger contributions to society. Either way, what you’re really saying is that the world needs more people to become better versions of themselves. But we have no basis for acting on that idea without a framework of internal human betterment.

The dominant voices in public policy model people as having the same fixed preferences.
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Most economists, for example, think about how to tune external incentives to produce mass changes in behavior.
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Market mechanisms are exalted precisely because they sculpt the supposedly granite hardness of human greed into architecture that uplifts us all. Few think about causing long-term changes in society through growth in individual character.
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