A PSYCHOLOGY FOR WORLD PEACE
The story of Abraham Maslow is a story of a man who caught a vision and who pursued that vision to such an extent that he actually created an entire paradigm shift in the field of psychology. In doing this he led the way in changing psychology from the dark side to the bright side of human nature. Amazing, wouldn’t you say? And due to his commitment to modeling self-actualizers, he established a human and scientific basis for the vision of people having far more potential than we ever dared to imagine.
It happened in 1941 immediately upon the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the entrance of the United States into the Second World War. Maslow had been paying attention to the disastrous events in Europe and the world war that had been initiated. Then in that December, he had a peak experience, an Aha! that changed his life. His first thought was that he wanted to do something to help. But he said, “I’m too old to join the army.” So what could he do? What could he contribute? That’s when the Aha! occurred. Suddenly he recognized that what world leaders really needed to create peace was a comprehensive and accurate model of human motivation, so he set out to create that.
To create peace we have to really understand what people want, we have to be able to answer such questions as:
- Why do people do what they do?
- What do people really want?
- What do leaders want?
- Why are some attracted to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussilini?
- What do people really want?
- What motivates them?
- What structures their personalities to be motivated as they are?
It was at that moment in time, December of 1941, that Maslow decided that the best he could do for the peace table was to provide an accurate and useful model of human motivation. And so his mission began in earnest. Then in 1954 he published his classic work that changed the face of psychology, Motivation and Personality.
In Motivation and Personality Maslow presented a model of human motivation that classified needs in two categories: lower and higher needs or drives. The lower needs operate by deficiency and powerfully drive us until the need that we lack is supplied or gratified. Then the drive dissipates and vanishes.
The higher needs are very different. They are growth drives, drives for expression, development —for self-actualization. Here we are driven not by lack, but by desire to be all that we can be, to more fully express ourselves. When these drives are satisfied, they grow. They become stronger.
Maslow introduced this model of motivation as a hierarchy with certain sets of needs giving rise to the next level of needs.The prepotency of the needs shows how all needs are not the same. Survival needs give rise to safety and security needs which then gives rise to social needs of love and affection which gives rise to self needs (self-esteem and self-regard). From these lower needs we then move up to the self-actualization needs—to the needs for knowing, organizing, creating beauty, order, truth, perfection, justice, spirituality, etc.
How does the hierarchy of needs help us understand people, communities, and nations? What does it offer to leaders and politicians? Because we are drive by deficiency for the lower needs, and the lower the need, the greater the desperation. So the first task is to create a society or community where people can easily satisfy their needs for survival, safety, social connection (love and affection) and self-value (self-confidence, self-esteem). If the structure and economics enable people to satisfy these lower needs, then no dictator strongman will be able to attract or appeal to people in terms of rescuing or “taking care” of them.
Then a society can move up the level of actualizing human possibilities for order, truth, discovery, beauty, knowledge in people. Maslow called these higher or meta-needs. Here we experience the meta-values and drives as well as the Being-cognition. The most radical aspects of Maslow’s model was how he showed that our higher needs or meta-drives were biologicallybased. They are part of human nature! They reveal the bright-side of human nature.
Question: How do we get there?
We get there by fulfilling our lower needs. As we gratify the first level, the next level arises and then the next. As each of the lower needs is satisfied, it disappears from our consciousness and new higher needs emerge. In this way we move up the hierarchy and eventually we rise up to the truly human needs and here there is no ultimate satisfaction. The more we get of beauty, truth, contribution, meaning, value, love, etc., the more we have to give and the more appetite we have for more. And it is here that we do things, not so much to get and attain, to make the drive go away (since it can’t), but to express ourselves, to release the possibilities and potentials within.
World peace— how does this work for peace on this planet? For Maslow it meant that he kept asking himself and others such questions as the following:
“How good a society can we create given human nature?”
“What do we need to do for the drives and needs of people so that we can create good people and a good society?”
“What interferes with people getting their needs met and moving to the highest needs where they can move beyond the law of the jungle of the lower needs?”
In Neuro-Semantics (as in NLP) we begin with the Maslow premise that there is a Bright Side of Human Nature that gives them resources and all kinds of possibilities. Assuming this we then work to release those potentials, activate a person’s fundamental powers of response and enable him or her to move to choice point for unleashing those possibilities.
This is what APG is all about as well as the other Neuro-Semantic Trainings:
- Unleashing your Wealth Creation Potentials and becoming financially independent
- Unleashing your Business Genius
- Unleashing your Writing Genius
- Unleashing your Health and Fitness Genius
- Unleashing your Learning Genius
- Unleashing your Reframing Genius (Mind-Lines)
Dr. L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
Authored by: Dr. L. Michael Hall Ph.D – author, developer of Meta-States, trainer and entrepreneur living in Grand Jct. Colorado. You can reach him via www.neurosemantics.com / www.self-actualizing.org
