The Fall of the Alphas by Dana Ardi

Author:Dana Ardi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

SIX

THE TOP OF A DIFFERENT PYRAMID

Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard.

—ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World

The Beta paradigm represents a modern alternative to the traditional, Industrial Age, pyramid-based hierarchy. But Beta can also symbolize ultimate fulfillment of a different, and more essential, pyramid: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

We expend a lot of human energy on the petty matters and affairs that clog up our daily schedules. Despite these various demands—from ensuring sales quotas are met to getting the kids to school on time—from a psychological perspective an individual’s greatest mission in life is to achieve what’s called self-actualization. For most of us, the ultimate personal goal, the primary aim, is to uncover our full potential as human beings: to be the most fully ourselves that we can possibly be.

Self-actualization is a term familiar to everyone who took Psychology 101 in college, or who has ever had to sit through a routine marketing presentation on consumer motivation. “Self-actualization,” and “What a man can be, he must be,” are in fact two of the phrases coined by psychologist Abraham Maslow in the mid 1940s, that he later expanded on in his influential 1954 book, Motivation and Personality. Instead of studying the mentally ill or the neurotic, Maslow studied high achievers with an eye toward developing more aspirational, success-oriented ideas. What he came up with certainly provided him with success.

Maslow drew a now-famous pyramid graph that he dubbed the Hierarchy of Needs. At the base of the pyramid he placed what he labeled as the most fundamental of human needs. The pyramid climbed and narrowed through five levels of needs from the most elemental to the most transcendent.

In order, from the bottom up:

• First are physiological needs for air, water, food, clothing, shelter, and sex, which make up the foundation.

• The next step consists of safety needs: personal and financial security, and the health of oneself and one’s loved ones.

• Third are the needs for love and belonging, which Maslow identified as being focused on relationships, either with family and friends, or with peers, coworkers, and teammates.

• Then comes esteem: the need to respect oneself, and to be respected by others.

• Finally, at the top of the pyramid, is the need for self-actualization, or as Maslow says elsewhere in his book, “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. He must be true to his own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.”1

Maslow’s theory was that individuals need to have their most basic, or “deficiency,” needs met before they can focus on higher-level, or “being,” needs. Those individuals positioned to achieve their highest-level needs Maslow saw as meta-motivated. While most psychological analyses of Maslow have studied his hierarchy as it applies to our personal lives, it’s just as relevant to our work lives.

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