Maslow’s Eupsychia: Imagining the Potential of a Self-Actualized Society

During their recent episode, Taylor, Carlisle, and Bares discussed Maslow’s Eupsychia: Imagining the Potential of a Self-Actualized Society, here’s an excerpt from the episode:

Jake: [chuckles] I’d be curious to hear your take on some of this stuff, Brian, because especially when we start talking about culture and what maybe what you’re looking for sometimes culturally in these really high-quality businesses. This is Abraham Maslow and the Blackfoot Indians. So, most of you have probably already heard of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, this famous pyramid. But there’s actually an interesting backstory, which led to an incredible foresight by Maslow.

Just a little background on him. He was a prominent American psychologist. He had this hierarchy of human motivation in the form of this pyramid. It suggests that there’s five levels of needs. The first is at the very bottom is the physiological needs, which are air, water, food, shelter, reproduction. The next one up is safety needs, so personal security, employment, health, property. The next one, above that is love and belonging, so friendship, intimacy, family. Above that is esteem, so respect, status, recognition. And at the very top of his pyramid was self-actualization, and that’s like becoming the most that you can be.

Now, according to Maslow, each individual must then satisfy the lower-level needs before they can get to the higher level. Like, you can’t be starving and then also self-actualized, perhaps– [chuckles]

Tobias: [unintelligible 00:41:57]

Jake: Yeah, I was going to say– Wasn’t that that what the Buddha did? Anyway, so what’s less commonly known about Maslow is the influence of the Blackfoot people on Maslow’s work. The Blackfoot Indians are this group of native American indigenous tribes that were traditionally residing in the northwestern plains of North America. Maslow spent six weeks in 1938 on a reserve with them, basically conducting anthropological research. During this time, he observed and interacted with their community. It really impacted his understanding of human behavior and motivation.

The Blackfoot have their own model of human needs and societal structure. It actually contrasted quite a bit with Maslow’s hierarchy. So, their model emphasized a communal approach to wellbeing and fulfillment. Like, their central philosophy was actualization, but a different context. It wasn’t individual centric. So, their actualization was like community-oriented process, and it was deeply connected to the collective wellbeing and really spirituality of the community. So, they believed that one person’s development and fulfillment were intertwined with the health and the wellbeing of community. This holistic view of self-actualization was in contrast to Maslow’s, which was a very individual version, like a very western version.

So, the Blackfoot’s top tier represented cultural perpetuity, actually. So, focusing on the preservation and continuation of cultural knowledge, tribal knowledge and practices for future generations, which is interesting to stretch out Maslow’s hierarchy, not only upward from you as the individual but also temporarily through generations.

So, his experience then influenced his later thoughts. So, after he’d already published his work, that was very seminal, in his later work, he introduced this concept of self-transcendence, which goes beyond self-actualization, includes a more holistic, interconnected view of humanity.

So, he took this integrative view, and then he started exploring the corporate world. I read this book. It was called Maslow on Management. It’s really just like a series of notes and journals that he’d taken to himself about what he was seeing and what else he wanted to research in the corporate setting. He wrote this in the early 1960s, and he was way ahead of his time. At that point, American corporate culture was very, very still industrial age. Like, “Here, I’m the boss. You go turn this wrench.” That was how it was run. It wasn’t like, “Oh, I want to make sure my guy on the forward line was self-actualized while he’s turning the wrench.”

So, anyway, in this, he delves much deeper than into the force for good that business can represent and can harness. He’s talking about enlightened employees, delighted customers, rewarding shareholders, happy communities that the businesses are operating in. He thought that the business world was actually the best laboratory for conducting experiments and observing human psychology. These thoughts, really, he anticipated so many management fads that became in vogue in the next 50 years.

He actually coined this term called, and I might be mispronouncing this, but it’s Eupsychia, E-U-P-S-Y-C-H-I-A. What that is is a thought experiment, basically like, imagine 1,000 self-actualized people on a sheltered island with no outside interference, what would be the upper limit of what human culture was capable of them working together in a self-actualized way? It’s like a utopia. That upper limit would be called Eupsychia.

So, one last little piece that I got from the book that was interesting, he identified that dignity and self-esteem really stems a lot from one’s work. He said that one really has to deserve the applause and the prestige and the recognition. Otherwise, it actually creates these harmful side effects of, like, when you know it’s not deserved, it causes guilt and self-doubt. And all of which, while I was reading this, he said that all sorts of psychopathogenic processes may start from undeserved applause, which made me wondering like, “Gosh, all these participation trophies that we’ve been handing out for the last 20 years [chuckles] in society are like, ‘Are there longer term ramifications to that?’” But anyway– [crosstalk]

Tobias: We’re finding out now.

Jake: Are we?

Tobias: We’re seeing it now.

Jake: Is that what’s happening in college campuses right now? I don’t know. We better not go there.

Tobias: My college campus was just as bad as that, I think. I don’t think that’s changed. But that’s a good segue, Brian. Culture is a very qualitative assessment. How do you go about assessing the people, assessing the culture? How do you bring some sort of replicable scientific rigor to it? Is that possible?

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