WASHINGTON, 28 August 2004 — In a recent “Letters to the Editor” column in a local newspaper a gentleman wrote, “Can you imagine Kerry stepping in as president right now with the world the way it is? Oh brother. We need somebody that will step up to the plate when the times call for it. I will question my safety if he is elected. I would rather be safe before worrying about money. Didn’t we learn from Maslow the order in which our needs must be met? My safety needs come before anything else.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell in an interview with newspaper editors late in 2004. Referring to concerns about deferring needs in Afghanistan and Iraq said, “...they are much farther down the Maslow hierarchy of needs. Don’t ask me to explain the Maslow hierarchy of needs. It might take a while.” Just what is the “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs” model and how does it relate to the current “war on terrorism” and the American public?
Abraham Maslow was a psychologist who studied the subject at the University of Wisconsin in the 1930s. His model for the hierarchy of needs dates from around 1943. The model applies to human beings and suggests that basic needs take precedence but, once these needs are met, other needs come forth in people’s lives. The most basic needs are those for physiological survival such as the air, water, food, etc. Next in order comes the need for safety and security. The next need level is social and belonging. Then comes the need for self-esteem and self— and other respect. And finally the need for self-actualization comes to the forefront.
Maslow put these needs in a nice 5-layered pyramid with each of the need-level areas stacked on top of each other and occupying a smaller space as they ascended. Maslow developed a model that almost every college student of psychology studies and one that is fairly universally accepted by social scientists.
Now let’s go back to the “war on terrorism” and Maslow. In Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, it was the “Nine Years War” that facilitated the seizure of power by the world reformers who then took control of nearly all human and social development. And in George Orwell’s “1984”, Oceania was in a constant state of war with a changeable enemy who “always represented absolute evil.” Huxley and Orwell clearly understood the way governments use war and the fear that is associated with war and insecurity to consolidate power. In Maslow’s hierarchy needs, safety and security come right above food, water and sleep. We crave stability and are willing to sacrifice higher-level values such as liberty and esteem for that stability.
Stability and security are difficult to establish in a chaotic world. It is particularly hard when we are constantly being reminded of new threats to our safety with a constant barrage of Homeland Security warning colors thrust at us almost weekly. We are also told that the threats halfway around the world from America are “better dealt with in Baghdad than Brooklyn.” Imagine how New Yorkers who worked in skyscrapers felt after Sept. 11. Could they truly have been very productive and reached for self-actualization in the first month or two after that incident?
Recently I observed a group of people looking at a small skyscraper standing by itself in the plains of the upper Midwest. They commented to me how vulnerable that building would be to “terrorists.” I mentioned to them that they should probably pay more attention to their own personal safety by making sure to fasten their seatbelts when they got into their cars to leave the area. They had clearly perceived the “war on terrorism” as threatening their own personal safety when daily, less dramatic events were much more likely to affect their personal security
George W. Bush was not known for his scholarly brilliance while a student at Yale. One wonders, however, if others in his administration might not have studied social science and psychology a bit more carefully than their boss. The nice neat pyramid of needs that Maslow developed, which generally applies to most of America and the Western world, has the “safety and security” level gradually ascending toward the higher levels. In other parts of the world, we might see a widening in the middle level, where social values play a more important role in even helping to secure physiological and safety needs. But in America, we now seem to have an oversized bulge in the needs area of “safety and security” and that definitely works to the advantage of those “taking care of us.”
The Bush administration and its Department of Homeland Security (sounds like it comes from Orwell’s “1984”, doesn’t it?) are our security blanket while, at the same time, they are constantly reminding us that our safety is threatened. Maybe Colin Powell should have taken the extra time to explain Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to the newspaper editors, particularly the way the Bush administration is using them to affect our security concerns. An article written not long ago in the Chicago Tribune by Rich Tafel, a Republican political analyst, stated, “But neither party’s base will decide the 2004 presidential election. The wide middle will, and applying one scientific approach, the ‘hierarchy of needs’ formula developed by the late Professor Abraham Maslow, to the 2004 election, we can see Bush will ride the unresolved war on terrorism to victory.”
— Dr. Michael Saba is the author of “The Armageddon Network” and is an international relations consultant.
