I’m reading The Fault in Our Stars, and aside from loving it, I am deeply satisfied that the narrator calls Maslow’s hierarchy of needs “utter horseshit.” I have always thought so, at least if Maslow said what my teachers said he said: that you can’t be concerned with the needs on the top of the pyramid until you’ve satisfied the needs lower down. In fact, the same school that taught me that taught me about the kamikazes, who are an excellent disproof.
But you don’t need to take sophomore-year history to have observed that people who don’t even have shelter or safety still do art and philosophy and concern themselves with self-actualization.
Sermons in Stones 
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May 20, 2014 at 3:59 pm
tatwood2005
Your words ring true, Amy! (Full disclosure: I learned Psychology 101 at Boston College from someone who worked with Maslow for five years.) Your post reminds me of the Welcome Address that Karl Paulnack gave at the Boston Conservatory of Music, excerpted within this piece by UU minister Lindasusan Ulrich:
“Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who had been held in the Nazi concentration camps, observed that those who could hold on to a sense of purpose were more likely to survive than those who felt they no longer had any reason to live. He noted that ‘what [humans need] is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled.’ [Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell]
Karl Paulnack tells the story of Olivier Messiaen composing Quartet for the End of Time while in a concentration camp in France. He writes:
‘Given what we have since learned about life in the Nazi camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—even from the concentration camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life.’
The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, ‘I am alive, and my life has meaning.’ ”
When humans are pushed past all human limits, it’s beauty and meaning that help us survive. And those are the keys that will help life on our planet survive as well.”
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May 20, 2014 at 4:03 pm
Nathan Harris
Typing by phone so lucky for you I will be brief. But I think this is a misunderstanding of Maslow.
Also, I read that book as suggested by a teen from my OWL class in AZ. Thought it was quite decent, but more geared toward a younger audience. A few witty moments though. Maybe I should read the man himself instead of depending on the high-school-psych-class version. Or you could give me a primer.
It’s a novel for teens, for sure, but well-written. I’ll be glad to pass it in to my daughter in a few years. –AZM
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May 20, 2014 at 10:31 pm
Andrew Hidas
Amy, it’s been many years since I read Maslow, but I think you may be reading him a tad too literally, as if he had these rigid divisions between the needs and one could not delve simultaneously into a number of them.
Like any ‘”stage” schema of human development or anything else, it’s a general map, a way of thinking about and approaching the psyche rather than a rigid formula with clearly demarcated, only-one-step-at-a-time segments. Sure, hungry and oppressed people can be spiritual and want to create art and know beauty (some more than others, while some steal food from bunkmates and would sell their own mothers for another spoon of soup). But on the whole, it is a good and necessary—and deeply spiritual—matter to make sure we and those around us are well fed before worrying too much about the power we might some day be able to exert on the job, the sex we might someday enjoy with our beloved, or the soul we will carefully tend in our UU church! And we both know how the ruling class can be only too happy to let poor people salve their souls with religion as justification for keeping them hungry and oppressed.
All things considered, I think the hierarchy is a useful tool and something of a clarion call for “first things first—get people fed. And that power and sex thing—you’re going to have to deal with those and a few other things in this life if you’re going to be the person your God calls you to be.” I like this use of it. I have known middle-class UUs to use it in a more insidious, hostile way, claiming that poor people couldn’t be interested in our church because they’re so consumed with survival that they’re incapable of pondering higher questions. (I am not speaking of Doug Muder, who made a much more nuanced argument about class barriers that has also been oversimplified by others to sound like “poor people aren’t up to the task of liberal religion.”) In much the same way, the fictional Hazel, dying of cancer and therefore deprived of the most basic security, feels that this hierarchy is saying she is incapable of concerning herself with philosophical questions or emotional transformations. We need to be careful.
Maybe the arrogance and cluelessness about life on the edge is Maslow’s interpreters’, not Maslow’s. –AZM
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May 22, 2014 at 10:37 am
joannevalentinesimson
Just went to Amazon and bought the book, The Fault in our Stars, on your recommendation.
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