META-GOALS AND GETTING WHAT YOU REALLY NEED

After writing the last Meta Reflection I had several conversations that made me realize that I have not yet distinguished goals and meta-goals as sufficiently as I want to. So I’ll give it another go. One reader asked the following which helped me realize that a person could set a meta-goal and then seek to fulfill it through a lower level need.

“Suppose I seek excellence and beauty through designer clothes? Would that be a meta- goal? Suppose I set justice and perfection as a meta-goal and seek it by becoming a dictator and impose my will on others?”

I’ll answer by once again navigating the subject of our human needs, the level of needs, the issue of satisfying the needs—adequately satisfying with true satisfiers, the conditions of satisfaction, and the nature of the being-values as meta-goals. This will involve distinguishing goals and meta-goals, basic needs and higher needs. This also reveals one of the ways that many people cut off their possibilities of self-actualizing: they semantically load a lower-level goal mis-perceiving it as a meta-goal.

The powerful point of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Prepotent Needs model is this: Needs come in levels. All needs are not the same; some are more fundamental than others. Others emerge over time as the foundation is developed and this explains the relationship between needs and their satisfiers.

Needs and Satisfiers While your “needs” drive you and create the biological impulses that you feel within, they can be “satisfied” along a range of satisfiers. “What will satisfy your need?” The answer to this is, Satisfiers occur along a range. You can adequately satisfy the needs and you can inadequately satisfy it. You can partially satisfy it and try in vain to satisfy them with things that will provide no satisfaction.

Maslow noted that at the lowest level, the range of satisfiers is very small and sometimes just the thing itself. The need for oxygen can only be satisfied by oxygen. Our need for trace salts, vitamin B or E, etc. can only be satisfied by one thing. For the need for sleep—only sleep will work. Yet as you move up the levels, the range of things that can satisfy a need increases. To satisfy the thirst need, you can use water, orange juice, coffee, Pepsi, etc. Many things can operate as a true satisfier for thirst. But there are things that will not satisfy that need. Trying to satisying thirst with a jar of dry peanut butter will not work. Nor will dirt, sand, rocks, or plastic

wrap used in packaging— such are not true satisfiers of thirst.

Here we can be wrong—we can make a cognitive mistake and think something will satisfy a need when it will not. The false-satisfier may even create harm, damage, death. And as Maslow noted, at the higher levels, it creates pathology— meta-pathologies.

At the survival needs level, there’s a close relationship between need and satisfier. But just move up the next level and the needs become more and more affected by meanings. What will satisfy your need for safety and security? Having locks on your doors, being able to know what neighborhoods to walk and which to stay clear of, having a gun hidden in your coat, having three insurance policies, having a roller-dex of names of people you could call in an emergency, knowing a marshal art?

What will satisfying your need for love and affection and all of your social needs? Being told that you’re pretty, having a favorite bar you stop by each evening, being in relationship, having your entry on facebook, knowing how to manipulate others to like you, etc.? What will satisfying your need for self-value and self-esteem? Driving an expensive car, having a six- figure job, wearing the latest fashion, etc.?

As you can see, moving up the levels expands the degree to which the need is semantically governed. This explains why you can take almost any commodity—almost any product or service and semantically-load it. Beginning with a need, you can now semantically load it with meta-goals to thoroughly confuse yourself. As you come to believe that clothes give you social likeability, or raises your self-esteem, or makes you feel safe and secure—you can load the latest fashion of clothes to these goals and then “shop till you drop” trying to get more love and affection, sense of security, and self-value.

Once you link the commodity to a goal, you could even link it to a meta-goal, to one of the being-values. You could link “wearing new fashionable clothes” to completeness, beauty, justice, fairness, contribution, and so on. Doing that not only creates a thorough confusion, it can even disorder personality. As “fashion” now becomes “the meaning of life.” Now you load designer clothes with so much semantic meaning that when you lack such, you are devastated.

In the past few weeks, we have had several cases of suicides in the US from the turndown of the Wall Street stock market. Losing “money,” and “investments” were so semantically loaded that the loss meant “life is not worth living.” It meant loss of status, loss of self-value, loss of hope, loss of purpose.

In human life, our first needs are our “lower needs” which are based on our biological needs as intelligent animals. We share these needs with the higher intelligent animals. These are the needs to survive, to be safe, to be social and have a social reality, and to be valued and have a place in society. Maslow put these needs into an hierarchical order and showed how that each next level of need emerges in awareness as a need is satisfied.

The higher needs are also biological (wired into our being) and emerge as the lower needs are satisfied. What makes this hierarchy a bit difficult to comprehend is that every day we move up and down all of the levels. At any time, we can be sent all the way to the bottom with our need for food, water, air, etc. As biological creatures, we will always need these. And every day we need them again. Yet along with these needs we also experience the higher needs —meaning, justice, understanding, beauty, order, contribution, etc.

The higher needs takes you into the human dimensions of experience. This realm of meaning creates inspiration and value for you, a reason to live, a why for doing what you do. It is the realm of being—being who you are and being rather than just doing. This is the realm of the being-values.

So to confuse money or fashion or food or status or a house or an investment with the being- realm confuses, disorients, disorders, and distorts human personality. So what are so many people trying to get with fashion, food, cars, etc.? A purpose for living. The meaningfulness of life. They are trying, but they can’t.

The point? Self-actualization is not a commodity—you can’t get it on the blue-light special at K- Mart; nor can your stock broker get it for you on the stock exchange. Self-actualization is an inner experience of the being-values that arise from meta-goals. Ah yes, the meta-goals— the higher goals that enable you to transcend yourself, your egos, your materialistic needs —to expressing your unique contributions that add to the beauty, justice, meaningfulness, richness of life for others.

So answering the question, your lower needs require the things that satisfy them and can be used to fulfil the meta-goals. Food is nourishment, clothes are for covering and warmth, and to over- load them leads to psycho-eating, psycho-spending and so on. Then our attempt to use them actually mis-uses them.