SELF-ACTUALIZING PEOPLE AS POLITICIANS

The very idea of self-actualizing politicians surprises, shocks, and astonishes people. I should know. I’ve been talking about this for several years and this is the theme of the twelve book in the Meta- Coaching Series, Coaching Politicians, which is scheduled for publications at the end of this year. It is all based on the same premises that I based the previous books on, namely, Self-Actualization Psychology.

Nor is the frame as radical as it might first sound. After all, once we start from the premise that human beings are designed, created, and programmed with the higher needs, for the being-needs and being-values at the top of the Hierarchy of Needs, then we suddenly have an entire paradigm shift for many fields. It offers a paradigm shift for Coaching, for Therapy, for Leadership and Management, for Business, etc. So why should it not also present a paradigm shift for Politics as well?

Along the way in this exploration, I came across certain facts about Maslow’s history and development, his collaboration with other leaders that resulted in the first Human Potential Movement and that led to “the secret history of NLP.” That information is now in the book, Self- Actualization Psychology, it is in articles on the international Neuro-Semantic website (www.neurosemantics.com) and also now in numerous NLP books and on numerous NLP websites.

Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that Abraham Maslow set out to create a paradigm shift in psychology for a political purpose. The year was 1941. The story is told in Politics and Innocence (1986).

“One day just after Pearl Harbor, I was driving home and my car was stopped by a poor, pathetic parade. Boy scouts and fat people and old uniforms and a flag and someone playing a flute off-key. As I watched, the tears began to run down my face. I felt we didn’t understand—not Hitler, nor the Germans, nor Stalin, nor the Communists. We didn’t understand any of them. I felt that if we could understand, then we could make progress. . . . I had a vision of a peace table, with people sitting around it, talking about human nature and hatred and war and peace and brotherhood. I was too old to go into the army. It was at that moment that I realized that the rest of my life must be devoted to discovering a psychology for the peace table. That moment changed my whole life.” (p. 149, italics added)

Maslow’s path in working toward realizing his vision of the peace table was to develop a comprehensive theory of human motivation. To that end he then devoted a decade of study and in the end, he created his classical work, Motivation and Personality (1954; 1970). This extensively researched book looked into the question of motivation— What do people really want in life? What drives them to go after the goals that they set? What motivates people to follow a dictator like a

Hitler or a Stalin?

Most psychological theories are not directly political or even related to politics, but the Humanistic Self-Actualization Psychology of Maslow is, and even more, it arose from a political question. Nor did it end there. Later in his life, during a sabbatical due to ill-health, Maslow served as the manager in his brother’s wine company, then as a consultant for an I.T. company in southern California that wanted to integrate the new psychology into management and leadership. Somewhere during those years, Maslow presented a political thought experiment.

He asked, given the premises in Self-Actualization Psychology and the characteristics of people living a self-actualizing life, especially the democratic attitude of equality and brotherhood, what would this mean for a society? What would happen if you took a hundred self-actualizing people, or a thousand such people, and created a brand new community out of them?

How would that group of self-actualizing people set up their community and then govern themselves? How would they manage their resources and interactions? How would they choose their leaders? Who would they want to be their leaders? What kind of political environment would they want?

Fascinating questions, wouldn’t you say? Psychology and politics—after all, what’s the difference? If a political system is any persistent pattern of human relationships that involves how we get along, how we make decisions about how to govern ourselves, how to allocate resources, how to be a group of people, then politics is inevitably psychological (and sociological, and anthropological). Beyond the University catalog that distinguishes these as courses for study, they are intimately and intricately inter-related and inter-related to such a degree that any separation is a separation in how we talk about them, to the territory that we’re pointing to.

Our psychologies inevitably imply certain politics and political policies and lead to certain ways of operating politically. What has been missing in most political conversations are the unspoken assumptions of people, human nature, human needs, drives, meaning-making, etc. So if politics refers to the ways people organize themselves in order to attain the greatest satisfaction of human needs possible within an environment and if our premise is that the single most important factor for a society is human potentiality, then this has to be a key factor in politics.

Otherwise our politics can be stunting and limiting and diminishing people. It can limit human possibilities and human development. If we have a stunted conception of human potential, this will be built deeply into the cultural norms and reinforced by the society. And that actually operates as a powerful a form of political tyranny. It creates a stunted political system as it has a lopsided view of human needs. Perhaps it puts the acquisition of material goods and social prestige as the upper limits of human growth. If that happens, then we think that is the upper reaches of human development and we do not structure our societies for the unleashing of the highest in human intelligence, creativity, and possibility. We may then make bread and circuses to keep people entertained and occupied the purpose of government.