Maslow's hierarchy
Everyone is driven to do stuff by a need, however, some needs come before others. Maslow, an American psychologist from the early 1900s suggested that there is a defined hierarchy. The idea was that once a lower level is fulfilled a person moves to the next, stage above. If you are hungry you buy some food, if you are thirsty you buy water. Once these basic needs (see Figure 1) are met then you can move up towards psychological needs such as relationships and prestige.
Maslow's Hierarchy and Environmentalism
In relation to the ecological crisis, which according to moral relativism should be the prime issue on everyone's agenda, it's not as human basic needs need to be met before they can address anything else. And with about 9.2% of the world, or 719 million people, living in extreme poverty, lacking food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, and education. It is impossible to think that our environmental issues will be faced before drinking water for nearly a billion people is solved.
There are some great potential solutions on the horizon such as Universal Basic Income, which is where a central body provides the lower rungs of human need [1] and has been shown to allow people to not behave in environmentally destructive work patterns and concentrate on other things. However, we must not slip into technoutopianism, these solutions whilst possible will not meet the need of all given our collective timeline. Our best bet, is to change what we can control, within our locality and do this collectively across the world, however, to start doing this we need to be able to change people's minds, unlearn bad habits and learn new ones.
The most effective means at our disposal to do this is to first understand the issue. What you will find is that it is convoluted, there are first a wide range of logical fallacies, cognitive biases and popular delusions that persist among us. Once understood and identified we need to help induce pivotal mental states to help people unlearn bad habits and then refocus on new transparent systems that will get us out of this mess.
References
- ↑ Canada’s forgotten universal basic income experiment: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200624-canadas-forgotten-universal-basic-income-experiment