In his classic 1943 paper, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Abraham Maslow proposed his famous “hierarchy of needs.” Maslow recognized that we never entirely escape needs and desires, but as we satisfy more basic needs, our desires become more ephemeral; thus, there is a difference between someone who wants food and someone who wants a new Porsche. Maslow’s hierarchy emerged from the recognition that until basic needs are met, “higher” needs are immaterial.

The bulk of the pyramid is made up of four levels of “deficiency needs”:

• Physiological needs, like sleep, food, water, air, regulation of body temperature, disposal of bodily wastes, and so forth.
• Safety needs, including a feeling of security for one’s future physical provisions, as well as physical safety from harm or violence.
• Love/Belonging needs, including friendship, sexual intimacy, raising a family, and so forth.
• Status or Esteem needs, such as social status, respect, recognition, and self-esteem.

Beyond this, Maslow posited a more controversial order of “being needs,” including “self actualization,” but for now, let us only consider the first four “deficiency needs.” The hierarchy is sometimes mistaken for a kind of “ladder” of psycho-spiritual progress; in fact, we all travel up and down the hierarchy constantly. Maslow also wrote of “peak experiences, as momentary fulfillments of the need for self actualization, but in a more mundane example, we all dip into the most basic somatic needs so regularly we’ve even named some of them: breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for example.

Obviously, too, reality is not quite as neat as Maslow proposes—sometimes we may be hungry, and pass on a perfectly good source of nutrition, for reasons of esteem or social standing, for instance—but, if we take the hierarchy as a broad, general guide rather than a strict or rigid law, it is certainly a helpful guiding principle that basic, somatic needs must generally be fulfilled before higher-level needs become a great concern.

The hierarchy of needs offers an excellent foundation for a consideration of that ephemeral quality of “legitimacy.” This is usually applied to states, but we can just as easily question the legitimacy of any society. All human societies are built on one fundamental promise, in a sort of “social contract,” if you will: society is the conspiracy of many humans, working together, to maximize the mutual fulfillment of their basic needs. Food may be the most pressing of these needs (see thesis #8), but it is not alone. We might judge the success of a society—its legitimacy, or how worthy that society is of its members’ support—based on how well it fulfills the basic needs of its members.

Societies often adopt greater complexity as a means of fulfilling their basic needs, most commonly safety (see thesis #10); agriculture likely developed to sustain already sedentary communities when resources invariably become scarce; armies, and ultimately the emergence of the state, offer protection from bandits, and ultimately, other states. At its best, complexity offers assurance against floods and droughts, as a means of managing the problems any society faces, and promises the provision of it’s members’ basic needs.

When the state cannot provide for these basic needs, it loses its legitimacy, and dies. As the science fiction writer Larry Niven put it, “They say that every society is only three meals away from revolution. Deprive a culture of food for three meals, and you’ll have an anarchy.” In one of his most essential posts on Global Guerrillas, “State Failure 101,” John Robb used precisely this argument to explain what the United States has done wrong in Iraq, namely, everything. According to Robb’s analysis, American efforts in Iraq are a nearly perfect inversion of Maslow’s hierarchy, spending the most effort on things like elections, the political equivalent of self actualization, while spending the least effort on basic needs. These needs are instead provided by tribal and sectarian interests; thus, it is the tribal and sectarian interests in Iraq that have legitimacy as primary loyalties.

Civilization, as a whole, must also provide for basic needs: food, water, air, and so forth. As we have seen—particularly, this week, with regards to water—civilization faces major crises in the near future for all of these needs. Unfortunately, most people are helpless without civilization; even those who understand, in theory, how to provide for their basic needs without civilization, are often mentally incapable of making the leap to do so. Much of this has to do with the fact that food, water, air, and other physiological needs are not the only ones that civilization provides us with. It provides us with a sense of safety and security, and it does provide us with a social context of esteem, as difficult as that context can be to navigate. As civilization lurches towards destruction through its inability to provide for our basic needs, we must make sure that the societies we begin to grow to take its place do not neglect our needs. This application of Maslow’s hierarchy does not only highlight the crisis of civilization and its loss of legitimacy; it also highlights the needs that our own, neo-tribal societies, must fulfill. Primitive skills can provide for basic, physiological needs, but this is not sufficient in itself. Our societies must also provide for our need for safety and security, belonging, and esteem. In other words, primitive skills are invaluable as a foundation, but they are not sufficient without a culture built on top of them.