Maybe Maslow had the whole goddamned thing upside-down?

I started today off by raging against Maslow’s Hierarchy. The more I thought about it, I started to think that I was doing it backwards.

“What is at the top anyway?”

When I really looked at it, I started to see it as just glorifying upward mobility, a kind of advertisement for Capitalism. After spending my entire adulthood mucking around at the “bottom”, I realized I have decided to just go up on my own. Isn’t all this ranting and raving about how the system failed me until I started looking at it differently, “self actualization”? The way I describe letting go of my illusions and ceasing to follow the understood rules has miraculously brought me a lot of inner peace and insight.

Maslow’s original model is based on American optimism. It is for the sheep who use the phrase “At the end of the day” and pay their taxes. It’s a dangling carrot. If you do A, B and C you will be able to achieve D. Sure, if you can afford therapy. If you flip the thing over, and start with a clear intention, “the desire to become the most one can be”, that begins to earn you “respect, self-esteem, status, recognition and freedom”. Either way you climb the thing, “Love and Belonging” fall somewhere in the middle part of your ascension. I already have friendship, intimacy, (well, maybe not intimacy) and a sense of connection but not much in the so-called “Safety Needs” of level 2: personal security, employment, resources, property?! I’m living on beans and rice in Mexico where my life is occasionally in danger. I’m looking forward to being able to buy whatever food I want and having a better “shelter”. Maslow is out of touch with reality, but we have to remember that he made this contraption in the 1940’s. I know it sounds kind of funny for me to say I really need to buy new clothing, but if that’s the way this, “pyramid” works for me, I know exactly where I’m going to buy my clothes when I get to the top of this damned thing.