Part Two
We may find the relation between ‘want’ and ‘need’ a little more obvious, but I know that’s likely from personal bias, and if nothing else glossing over it helps to fill out the length requirement. But strangely, I often consider needs and wants almost automatically as opposing forces, and I have enough of an academic background and brain cells to know that this is nowhere near the complete reality. To lack something isn’t necessarily to need it, like when shopping for a new fashion or game. Although true, there are also cases when the two align: a hungry kid in a food-insecure home. If there’s no food in the house and they’re hungry they sure as hell are going to be interested in getting a meal.
This cheap example plays right into one of the standard perspectives in psychology on the hierarchy of wants. In layman’s terms the concept infers a person’s wants correlates to their basic needs of survival that they have yet to satisfy. As the more basic items are secured more sophisticated wants can be explored. So someone without neither food, shelter, procreation, nor education would pursue those needs as their driving wants in that order, represented as going up a pyramid from more basic individual survival to group/cultural survival (shelter and food are often interchangeable in their order). The argument here is that people, first and foremost, want to survive, persist. We need to persist. And these are the needs that accomplish that goal. I would definitely like to note the emphasis, as it was impressed upon me, of the hierarchy of this system and that, like a flowchart, you cannot move on to the next stage until you resolve the previous step.
As a side note, it’s definitely interesting to think of how capitalism in its current state forces a large portion of the masses to be stuck somewhere on this pyramid through insufficient healthcare and school systems that are poorly designed for education. Capitalism cannot survive without systemic poverty, cannot survive without someone on the lower ranks of the pyramid. The lower the rung people are stuck on, focusing their time and money just to secure that one level, the less opportunities they have to pursue higher needs like quality education. Thus perpetuates the prevention of solutions, or at least improved alternatives, to capitalism.
Of course this tiered framework is by no means ironclad. Perhaps if people were as mechanical as computers and run by simple logical processes, sure. If people were that straightforward the clearest solution for prospering as a species would be to first successfully provide everyone stable housing. Then and only then should we move on to ending world hunger. Then onto diseases, procreation, education, until and only finally, art. Alas, we inherited the mixed blessing and curse (blurse) of chemical based bodies and brains. We’re filled to the brim with code that has been edited so many times by so many editors over the ages that simple solutions are no longer available to us. Nature’s chaotic trial and error has certainly made a beautiful mess of things, no? People regularly want things that are detrimental to their survivability, ranging from causes such as mental illness, lack of rationality, conflicting needs, and conflicting wants.
I think this hierarchical framework I’m describing fails to acknowledge the potential shift in the shape and perhaps even the order of these needs in -at the very least American- society. Image in society is sometimes almost as vital as access to food. Take for example the strange paradox of the typical interview process. Last I knew there is this expectation that to acquire most jobs, including many a menial one, the interviewee must present themselves well. I would even argue that the interviewee is best off dressed slightly better than the position they’re vying for. Which means there is this underlying expectation, through image, that the person doesn’t quite need the job, that they’re not so far at the end of their rope that not getting paid might completely starve them. Most bosses would find it hard to set aside such internal biases to hire a worker whose home and consequently home business went up in flames the night before, leaving them penniless and smelling of woodsmoke in their pink fluffy pajamas. Image in that case is survival.
The Quiet Mirror 
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