Cultural Self-Actualization

In previous Reflections I wrote about self-actualizing companies and communities. What would a self-actualizing company be like? How would a group of people dedicated to the principles of self-actualization operate? How would their community differ from the way communities arise and develop who don’t believe in and operate in a supportive way of bringing out the best in every person?

For self-actualizing individuals to unite together to create a movement, a community, a company, or a nation, they will create a union around the principles of what I have been calling Self-Actualizing Psychology. Operating from the bright-side of human nature, they will assume that people want to grow, assume new responsibilities, stretch to new levels of performance, take pride in learning, developing, and achieving. They will assume that people want to make a difference, create and experience meaning in their activities, career, and relationships.

They also assume that as people gratify the lower needs and move beyond them to the higher, they develop a whole new form of motivation, from deficiency motivation to abundance motivation. This enables them to be less competitive with others, more collaborative, more of a team member, and more supportive.

Given all of that, you can begin to imagine what a self-actualizing company may be like. It would not be a top-down, command-and-control type of hierarchy. It would be more democratic, as it would support people learning, recovering from mistakes, interacting with others, and exploring possibilities.

Maslow, especially in his work on business and management (Maslow on Management), address a lot of these questions as he spoke about translating the ideas of self-actualization to the culture in general. As he did, he spoke about the necessary conditions, the “good conditions” that seem correlated with self-actualizing people.

Yet what about these good conditions? What does that mean? Is that a guarantee that everyone will self-actualize? Maslow (1971, The farther reaches of human nature, wrote:

“It is now quite clear that the actualization of the highest human potentials is possible — on a mass basis—only under “good conditions. . . . Or more directly, good human beings will generally need a good society in which to grow. That society is good which fosters the fullest development of human potentials, of the fullest degree of humanness.” (p. 7)

So what are the good conditions that make self-actualization possible? And how many of these good conditions do we need in order to begin or continue the self-actualizing process? We need the freedoms of democracy that provide freedom of thought and freedom of speech. We need the ability and opportunity to explore new possibilities by using the marketplace of supply and demand to determine value. We need the good conditions of having lower needs (survival, safety, social, self needs) gratified so that we can explore contribution, beauty, music, mathematics, and all of the other things that create meaningful significance in our lives.

Yet the surprise in that even good conditions, in and of themselves, are not enough. Merely having the time, money, energy, and intention to self-actualize does not automatically “cause” a person to self-actualize. There are plenty of people with the financial and time resources who do not self-actualize, and who have no intention of doing so. There are also those who, when given the time, space, and money for self-actualization, will use it for the very opposite. They will use it for taking advantage of others, engaging in crime, and even hurting people. As Maslow realized this, he wrote,

“The big point is not to think that good conditions inevitably make all human beings into growing, self-actualizing people. The little bit of larceny and sadism and all the other sins which you can find in practically any human being may be called forth by these ‘good conditions’ when the person is trusted and put completely on his own honor.”

What does this mean? It means that without the kind of self-responsibility that undergirds self- management, people will not be on their best or do what’s noble. Give a person “good conditions” who is not able to control his or her own thinking, emoting, valuing, believing, acting, etc. and you might only create a criminal, even a sociopath. The mere fact of the external conditions that are “good,” i.e., democratic, full of resources such as time, money, energy, health, etc. does not make self-actualization inevitable. In this, self-actualization is a much more inside job. It is something chosen and envisioned. It is a stage of developmental the person, of the person’s mental and emotional maturity.

So, given that, what does self-actualization say about economic theory? How does it relate to economics? Or, how do we pay someone for work or a job when it is a self-actualizing job? Again, Maslow addressed this also.

“One characteristic of good conditions that are emerging is that good conditions can have a bad, even catastrophic effect on a certain small proportion of the population. Freedom and trust given to authoritarians will simply bring out bad behavior in these people. Freedom and permissiveness and responsibility will make really dependent and passive people collapse in anxiety and fear.” (235)

How about that? Good conditions can have bad effects. It can even have catastrophic effects. Amazing, is it not? Give some people (i.e., authoritarians, fanatics, “true believers”) the conditions that are “good” and useful for self-actualization and what happens? It brings out the worst in them. Give it to people who are ill-intentioned, undeveloped, stuck in an resourceful state, etc., and good conditions can actually make things worse.

What a dilemma! We identify the conditions that are good for calling forth the self-actualizing vision and process and, with some people, it evokes the opposite. In this we cannot rely only upon social engineering. We have to rely upon changing and transforming the belief frames of people so that they have a new inner game. When they have a new inner game, then the new outer game that we want to support and facilitate will occur. And that, my fellow Neuro- Semanticists, gives us the marching orders of our mission, does it not?