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Addressing Needs

Dec 05, 2011 Editorial

With a new President in State house, maybe it’s time we seriously ask ourselves, “What do we really need?” The election campaign is over, so we can be a bit more realistic. There is, of course, the popular distinction between ‘wants’ and ‘needs’.
The former are deemed to be somewhat more fickle and ephemeral as opposed to the latter that supposedly go deeper into our psychological makeup. Wants, then, may be infinite but needs presumably are more limited and hopefully may be satisfied.
We can turn the question on its head and propose that our needs may provide a potent source of explanation as to who we are, what are the bases of our behaviour and our social interaction? If, as has been proposed, we are all driven by needs, then our society and its rules must be responsive to these needs.
Or we will find ourselves bemoaning individuals and groups “acting out” as they strive, desperately to “express” themselves and their frustrations. Such drives may inevitably lead to conflict and violence.
So what are some of these needs? According to the renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow, we all have a hierarchy of needs that are ranked in the order of their attainment. We begin, according to Maslow, from the basic physical needs of food, water and shelter – which we share with all our fellow animals.
When we talk about “basic needs” we cannot get more basic than this. In Guyana, while we may quibble about how far we are from the standards of the “developed” countries, we believe that by and large our basic needs are being met. But we need to do better and the Millennium Development Goals establish reasonable yardsticks.
Maslow proposed that after fulfilment of the basic needs, we are driven to demand safety and security. Based on the primordial nature of our conflicts in the last decade, and the fears aroused during the elections, not many Guyanese would deny Maslow’s assertion.
We then move on to non-physical things that go deep into our psychological makeup and into the realm of needs that distinguishes us from other animals and indeed perhaps make us human. We need belonging or love, self-esteem and finally, personal fulfilment. And it is because these needs are provided by other humans that we have been called a “social animal”.
These latter needs emphasise the importance of family, friends, community and society. Without these institutions we would all revert to the feral creatures that were formed when some babies were abandoned in the wild.
Families are the fundamental unit for making us human and it is not a coincidence that with the gradual erosion of the family in recent decades, the psychological degradation of many members of our society has increased exponentially.
In such dislocations, many youths will seek fulfilment of their “higher” psychological needs in gangs that provide recognition.
On a larger scale, in the modern increasingly atomised world, it may not be surprising that the saliency of ethnic groups has skyrocketed. It has been said with more than a little truth, that only the ethnic group accepts us for “what we are”. We ought not to be surprised at the ethnic orientation in the elections: it is more than a matter of “economic” interests.
Extending the early insights of Maslow, other theorists have posited that human needs are actually the emergence of the essentials of our human development – and that the needs do not have a hierarchical order. We seek to fulfil our needs simultaneously in a strong and inexorable manner.
They contend that needs also include the human quest for identity, cultural security, freedom and distributive justice. Our societal arrangements will court trouble, they assert, if these needs are not allowed to be fulfilled.
While some have emphasised the importance of addressing “interests” in our angst-ridden society, ignoring the underlying needs and just negotiating the interests may at times lead to a short-term settlement, but it rarely will lead to long-term resolution of our problems.
The new government would do well to contemplate this reality.

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