Beyond Maslow's pyramid || Freeing basic needs from trancewar manipulation

In part, the trancewar manipulates thinking to make the satisfaction of human needs contingent on rendering service to the desires of a control regime. To understand how exactly the trancewar operates, it is useful to look at basic needs systematically, as well as how the system of needs translates into the motivations from which actions stem.

Though Abraham Maslow's hierarchy is a popular lens through which to view human needs and the satisfaction thereof, I am of the opinion that Maslow's hierarchy is best applied to individual psychology, and consider Manfred Max Neef's 'fundamental needs matrix' to be a better fit for making sense of this stuff as it applies to groups (and broader societal circumstances).

Max Neef begins with a comprehensive examination of how our needs are perceived, and then systematically revises the concept of needs based on what his examination reveals. Importantly, he finds that needs are universally subjective, both in their quantifiable substance and in determining whether they have or can be been met in a given circumstance.

This tends not to be accounted for in (and is deliberately avoided by) traditional economic theories, particularly with regard to intangibles.

Max Neef attends directly to this in the following quote:

“The ways in which we experience our needs, hence the quality of our lives, is, ultimately, subjective. When the object of study is the relation between human beings and society, the universality of the subjective cannot be ignored...From the neoclassical economists to the monetarists, the notion of preferences is used to avoid the issue of needs. This perspective reveals an acute reluctance to discuss the subjective-universal.”

These universally subjective needs can be categorically expressed as existential or axiological, and only the needs for subsistence and protection are described as subject to hierarchical ordering (as per Maslow, etc.), while all the other fundamental needs are recognized to demand simultaneous or concurrent satisfactions which may or may not overlap according to situational factors.

The interaction of two short lists of needs - one for each category - is then used to make a comprehensive map of basic needs:

Fundamental Needs Matrix:

Needs	Being (qualities)	Having (things)	Doing (actions)	Interacting (places)
Subsistence	attributes	non-material systems	individual & group	times & spaces
Protection	attributes	non-material systems	individual & group	times & spaces
Affection	attributes	non-material systems	individual & group	times & spaces
Understanding	attributes	non-material systems	individual & group	times & spaces
Participation	attributes	non-material systems	individual & group	times & spaces
Creation	attributes	non-material systems	individual & group	times & spaces
Leisure	attributes	non-material systems	individual & group	times & spaces
Identity	attributes	non-material systems	individual & group	times & spaces
Freedom	attributes	non-material systems	individual & group	times & spaces

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Beyond this typology, Max-Neef notes that, "any fundamental human need that is not adequately satisfied reveals a human poverty... But poverties are not only poverties. Much more than that, each poverty generates pathologies."

(quotes from: Real-Life Economics: Understanding Wealth Creation, ed. Paul Ekins & Manfred Max-Neef, Routledge, London, 1992, pp. 197-213. Matrix adapted from wikipedia's)

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Every need is treated as an opportunity to exploit people's unconscious machinery in the trancewar. So is every new need created by a pathology resulting from some other need going unmet.

By procedures of choice editing, carried out at the tribal, institutional, marketplace, and network levels in various ways, social reality is structured to manufacture new needs, as well as select for behaviors that are harmful to individuals or groups of people (i.e.pathological) but which further the agendas of successful manipulators of our 'collective unconscious' (as conceptualized here).

Understanding basic needs is a critical step towards resisting unconscious manipulation. It also clarifies inner motivations - and where these may be at odds with each other or produce behaviors which conflict with conscious priorities.

If needs are explicitly named, and the priority each specified need is assigned is brought into conscious awareness, it becomes far easier to avoid being tricked by your unconscious into acting against your overall best interests. And by beginning to communicate with others around the subject of basic needs - though this sometimes requires a level of honesty that many people are uncomfortable with - the network of shared and conflicting interests underneath the shared stories we tell about what is happening becomes far more apparent.

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If you would like to learn more about the trancewar, or if you are interested in contributing to the development of practical solutions to the problems that it causes and is likely to cause in the future, stay tuned. I will continue posting on the topic regularly.