What to Know Before You Go

[marct]

Hi Ron,

Been trying to get my head around what I wanted to say but kids and all got me focusing on moslow's Hierarchy for real

Ah, yes, dear old Maslow - sigh!

The one thing that always bothered me in school when discussing this was the fact that so much of what is assumed and accepted in the model is interchangeable due to human political and social development or lack thereof.

Everyone eats but how much and when and where, and what kind is all determined more by the decisions they make reference dieting or working out, etc. There is a sociopolitical element to almost all of the steps and the last one being the most dynamic.

Yupper, and a lot of that is cultural. One of the things that has been bothering me about a lot of the state-building stuff is the uncritical assumption of individuality, aka the application of Maslow's Hierarchy where it shouldn't be applied. As you note

Self - Actualization = what?

For example, so much of the state-building literature makes the assumption that if there is a solid economic infrastructure, people will be too busy making money to revolt. Really? Self actualization through material wealth comes out of the Protestant Revolution (okay, it's actually from radical Calvinist theology; cf Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism), but what about other status/value chains? Just speaking personally, money isn't a major motivator.

It changes for each person based on their situation=ok, but it changes for too many other reasons as well, who you are, where you're from, who you know, what you're told by whom, etc. To cap it all off western society seems to get a kick out of changing the rules for what actual = self-actualized, so no matter what one does we can always do better, and if there is no better ; well we'll make up what better should be.

Marketing..... Seriously, in an economic system based on selling 1600 vairieties of ice cream that all taste like ____, you have to create fads which means you have to change what is de rigeur every season. When I reworked my Intro to Anthro course a couple of years ago, I described this as "the problem of plenty".

Long and short it seems to me that we have a pretty difficult time selling a lot of our "learning" to these outside countries because they probably actually reflect the hierarchy more than we do .

I'd disagree with that, but only in the sense that you are operating on totally different specifics of the hierarchy.

Marc