The Hierarchy of Needs

THE HIERARCHY OF NEEDS

Book Three of the Human Series

Discover your needs in their continuous harmony or hierarchy

Eleventh Edition

Valentin Matcas, M.Ed.

Published by Valentin Matcas at Smashwords

Copyright © 2016 - 2024 Valentin Matcas

ISBN: 9781311052650

All rights reserved

Cover: Valentin Matcas

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

I dedicate this book to everyone eager to learn and develop continuously throughout life.

Contents:

1 Your Hierarchy of Needs Revealed

2 Needs, Fulfillment, and Your Successful Development

3 First Level Consensual and Algorithmic Needs

4 Niches and Needs

5 Second Level Animal Needs

6 Life, Intelligence, and the Intelligent Human Needs

7 Needs and the Natural Laws of the Universe

About the Author

1 Your Hierarchy of Needs Revealed

What do you want the most in life? Is it immediate gratification, or continuous prosperity and development? Is it the best for you and your family, or the best for the entire world? Or is it simply to feel the best, as much as possible? Because your needs determine your life, as they always seek to control you, in every manner. While you can still choose their entire fulfillment, in any order, manner, and priority you desire. Because everything common, necessary, unique, delightful, and original in life and in the world, you do in order to fulfill your needs.

This is exactly your hierarchy or harmony of needs and fulfillment, and if you ignore it, you end up living your life randomly, ideologically, or instinctually, but not at the intelligent human level.

Your needs might not always regard you, as you expect. Study yourself throughout your fulfillment, to see how you do not actually live your life on your behalf, but on behalf of your cells. Because your entire activity is meant to tend to your cells, in every manner, and nothing else. Your eating activity is an example, since you always eat in order to feed your cells. It is the same with thirst, security, breathing, recovery, and reproduction, because you fulfill all these in order to tend to your cells, and to keep their genetic material in the world long after you are gone.

Yet there is still more to your needs and fulfillment to study and understand, because you live your life on behalf of your cells, body, and subconscious mind through the fulfillment of your lower level needs, while you live your life on behalf of your family, community, nation, society, and the entire world through the fulfillment of your needs of higher levels and higher classes. Because people expect you to fulfill some of their needs too, while they also fulfill yours.

But can you ever make order in all these? Study yourself now, to find your lifelong activity filled with a multitude of needs, all being more or less important, harder or easier to fulfill, higher or lower in nature, addressing higher classes of life or only yourself, with all needs fulfilled randomly or in a precise order or hierarchy.

Throughout this book, we model the human needs and fulfillment while identifying and classifying them accurately, by studying closely all hierarchies and harmonies of needs, helping you distinguish the necessary in your fulfillment from the irrelevant, in order to find a clear meaning in life and in the world, for you and for the entire world.

There are eleven distinct levels of needs, with only the first four levels addressing living human beings directly. These are the needs of the zero, first, second, and third level. The third level needs are the intelligent human needs, as your higher level need for righteousness in the world, or your current higher level need for learning, which you fulfill right now while reading this book. Second level needs are animal physiological needs, as eating, breathing, reproduction, recovery, social, and security. First level needs are your consensual servitude needs, involving all legal and ideological circumstances, allowing you to serve laws, rules, concepts, masters, superiors, and through them, the entire current society. While in exchange, your servitude assures the fulfillment of your own natural needs, through money and through the multitude of privileges that you give and receive. Since this is why you follow laws, beliefs, and orders, performing your duties flawlessly throughout the current social hierarchy, in order to be able to fulfill your own natural needs too, or in order to constrain others to fulfill your own natural needs, depending on social status.

As a reference, consensual means agreement. I refer to these first level needs as consensual needs, since you fulfill them on behalf of your legal and ideological superiors and authorities, through entire sets of agreements, forming and maintaining in this manner most of your existence. While you behave exactly how your superiors and authorities demand, on their behalf, fulfilling their own needs, which may be natural or consensual. You fulfill your first level needs for servitude, and in exchange, they fulfill your lower level needs, as your addictions of the zero level, along with your animal, physiological, subsistence needs of the second level.

Yet there is always a significant difference between the zero, first, second, and third level development, meaning, and existence, and it is important to identify it. While in your case, as a living human being, the third human developmental level should be mainly considered.

Or not, since everything depends on you. Because you always have a choice in life and in the world, and it is always respected. More precisely, you always have the choice to fulfill your needs in any order and priority you desire, or you may skip them altogether if you want, and this is exactly your hierarchy or harmony of needs.

What exactly are these needs, levels, classes, choices, and hierarchies? These are exactly the conceptual elements of knowledge necessary to make this specific research of the human hierarchy and harmony of needs a third level intelligent, analytic study. Otherwise, we end up with yet another ideological debate or empirical presentation of the human life or human condition in the world, while the current science is full of these.

The zero level needs consist of the main, highly significant need for pure pleasure. This main need is found at the core of your cognitive system, and it is your master need, capable to control all your needs throughout life. Because you never engage in the fulfillment of any of your needs if you do not seek pleasure first, and if you do not want to avoid pain in general throughout life. How does it work?

First, you receive your need in form of a specific feeling, you identify it, you reason in order to know how to fulfill it, and then the entire activity of fulfillment is determined, monitored, controlled, and adjusted through your punishment-reward cognitive mechanism that motivates your entire fulfillment, rewarding or punishing you continuously for your success or for your neglect, ignorance, and failure. While you never undertake this entire task of fulfilling needs if you do not crave for this main need for pure pleasure, as you follow your reward throughout life. Otherwise, you are never determined to engage in anything throughout life and you die shortly through lack of subsistence, wondering what went on.

There are people who live an entire life unconsciously, only by following their main need for pure pleasure, and are still capable to achieve everything throughout life, or at least everything at the physiological and consensual level. While it is better this way than being at the zero level addicted or in a coma. Yet it is common for this natural, main need for pure pleasure to render you addicted, since this is why you must always monitor carefully your feelings, reasoning, and behavior. And since you have to be already at the third intelligent human developmental level in order to use your reasoning to monitor your needs, feelings, behavior, and therefore fulfilment throughout life, you cannot do so at the zero addicted level, first consensual level, or second animal level. Or you do not want to do so while living your life on lower developmental levels, since you find it irrelevant, tedious, and lacking pleasure, in a rather consistently reinforced condition keeping you underdeveloped. And it happens often, just look around.

Needs and fulfillment build you entirely from the inside out, along with everyone and everything else, throughout life and existence, in all species, ages, civilizations, forms of life, and entire worlds and realities. Because everything within you is alive, shaping and reshaping you from the inside out, through their own needs, meanings, and fulfillment. As everything starts with you, with your needs, and with your choices in life to fulfill your needs defining your hierarchies and harmonies of needs and fulfillment throughout life, resulting in everything that ever is.

Maslow had identified and depicted only five needs from the entire complexity of the human cognition, as the trivial needs to eat, sleep, excrete, and reproduce, placing at the top of this restraint, superficial hierarchy of needs a main ideological need meant to render you even more capable and determined to serve. And now this is psychology.

Levels of needs are different than levels of forms of life, yet they still maintain correspondence. Forms of life allow individual living beings to unite and live life together as a higher class, or as a higher form of life, which in itself is a larger individual living being. Cells are living beings of the second form of life, which is the common cellular form of life. Furthermore, cells gather by the trillions to live life in an organism, and as an organism, which is the third, organic form of life.

Organisms are also individual living beings as seen from their own perspective, and they are of the third form of life, which is the common organic form of life. Organisms gather to live life in higher social classes of life, as families, communities, nations, and societies, which are social forms of life of the fourth level and higher. There are higher and higher forms of life defining everything alive everywhere and continuously, with the highest form of life as Life herself, or the One, or the Divine, or Intelligence, depending on your perspective, beliefs, and level of understanding.

Each individual living being has a wider range of needs to fulfill throughout life. Needs of lower classes address the inner individual living beings, as your cells. While needs of higher classes address your family, nation, or the entire society.

You notice that you may live your life in order to provide for your cells, while your cells live their lives on your behalf. They do everything for you, all specialized in everything that you need throughout life, always living and working in order for you to be able to provide better for them. It is more of a closed sphere of interconnectivity, uniting your lifetime meaning and activity with those of your own cells, forming in this manner your inner sphere of interconnectivity of needs, feelings, meanings, and fulfillment in life. And here is where you may find the multitude of hierarchies of needs and intelligences forming consistently throughout life while following the multitude of specialized activities that you have to undergo in the outside world in order to fulfill your needs.

It is the same with the current society, since you have to go to work continuously for society, throughout the multitude of its hierarchies. While society facilitates the fulfillment of your individual and family needs, mostly through money and other privileges, since the current society is consensual.

Yet you do the same within your family, in a harmonious manner this time, since your family is your own living human environment, and it is harmonious. As this is another sphere of needs and meanings, an outer sphere of interconnectivity, uniting you with society and with everybody comprising society, including your family, hierarchies, jurisdictions, ideologies, and entourages.

These two inner and outer spheres of interconnectivity of needs and meanings intertwine through you, making your own life possible. While you should always keep them harmonious, consistent, and connected throughout life.

Interconnectivity is always possible through the multitude of needs, feelings, fulfillment, concepts, and understanding, since order and unity are harmonious or hierarchic. While through the inner and outer circles of interconnectivity, they form, maintain and develop the specific inner and outer hierarchies and harmonies engaging everything and everyone in life and in the world, living beings and intelligences alike, including all hierarchies of needs studied throughout this book.

While you may always find these major hierarchies and harmonies reflected everywhere, within yourself as hierarchies and harmonies of needs, intelligences, feelings, and fulfillment, and in the outside world as the usual social hierarchies found everywhere, along with all family harmonies or hierarchies, depending on cases. Since you may have either harmony in life, or hierarchy, depending on cases.

While harmonies are very complex and highly meaningful to understand and account for throughout life, or you lose them, and your life remains empty and dreadful from then on. And it happens with everybody. I study these subjects throughout this entire book series, and they are highly complex, forming and defining Life and the world altogether. While a multitude of additional circles of existence coexist alongside your inner and outer circles of existence, as your higher circle of existence.

It is easy to distinguish and classify needs despite their complexity, once we find an order of importance or priority among them, which is the hierarchy of needs, to help you with the management of your feelings, reasoning, and behavior.

For example, hunger is your need for food, while thirst is your need for liquids and minerals. But what if you feel both hungry and thirsty simultaneously? Which need exactly is more important so you may fulfill it first? These needs are both trivial and they have the same priority, however, your social needs tend to be more prioritized in life, with your reproductive needs being the most important. Or this is the manner in which the current society determines you to form your hierarchy of needs, and now this is the manner in which you have to fulfill it.

Yet notice how your social and reproductive needs are physiological or animal in nature, and therefore they are of the second animal level. Should you not prioritize your human nature first? Because if you always prioritize your animal needs, then you are only an animal throughout life, being forced to live your life as a human being.

The intelligent human needs are your needs for abstract learning, along with your needs for equality and wellbeing in the world, along with your need for cognitive development.

Do you happen to prioritize your higher level needs throughout life? Tough luck, because throughout the current society, higher level needs pale in comparison with reproductive and social needs, along with eating needs and addictions, as though you were an animal, an addict, or a servant in the world, forced now to live your life as a human being. Since this is how all problems start.

Your status depends on your level of cognitive development, which in turn determines the levels of the needs that you are disposed and capable to fulfill throughout life. Yet you are an intelligent human being at least now, because by reading this book, it means that you prioritize your human needs against your animal and consensual needs.

Yet let us see if you prioritize your third level needs against your lower level needs. Right now, besides your need for higher learning, which is a third level human need, do you also happen to feel the need to visit the bathroom, which is a second level physiological animal need? Because at the intelligent human level, your subconscious tends to prioritize intelligent human needs, by postponing its own physiological needs, as eating, sleeping, and visiting the bathroom. Therefore, if you have the need to go to the bathroom right now, but you do not feel it too much, or it does not actually bother you while you read this book, it means that your entire cognitive system, conscious and subconscious, prioritizes your higher level need for learning, against the need to go visit the bathroom, momentarily.

And this is your current hierarchy of needs as you read this book, with your needs for learning and development on top, and with the rest of your needs lined up below, as they stand in line waiting to be fulfilled too, eventually. While if you prefer to see your friends or to go shopping for groceries instead of reading this book, it means that it is the other way around, you and your subconscious prioritize animal needs, instead of intelligent human needs.

Why exactly do needs have to line up in various shapes, forms, hierarchies, and harmonies? Can’t you just have your needs and fulfillment normally arranged, as in a first come first served basis, in an egalitarian cognitive manner, so everybody is happy? Isn’t this better? No, since living beings and cognitive systems in general are highly complex, and should be studied accordingly. Because as you always notice, living beings and intelligences are never machines, mechanisms, or computers to allow you to understand them through the common, first level algorithmic reasoning, as in the first come first served basis. As a reference, all logical thinking including inductive and deductive thinking is algorithmic, and therefore of the first algorithmic level.

Because you are only one as an organism, capable to fulfill consciously only one need at a time. And therefore, all the other needs have to wait or adjust themselves according to all inner and outer circumstances. Even more, your own body reshapes itself, changing modes of life that you may easily identify and experience as moods and tendencies, generated intrinsically through highly laborious and highly significant hierarchies of needs, hierarchies of intelligences, and therefore hierarchies of fulfillment. While as a conscious intelligence, you have to identify, understand, and attach yourself through your conscious activity within each one of your modes of life, in order to maintain your inner and outer harmony, achievement, fulfillment, and homeostasis continuously throughout life. While your inner harmony generates, maintains, and enhances your outer family and social harmony, while these are highly significant to maintain and develop throughout life, or else you are no more. Since many times, when you fail in life, you exit life, feet first. As it is the case with all living beings and their entire species, ecosystems, worlds, and realities. Since Life herself is merciless every time you remain unsuccessful.

While throughout the current science and education, you find life treated as a first level mechanism, studied through first level consensual, ideological and algorithmic thinking, in a continuously inadequate, compromised research. Since this is how ideologies and entire regimes and systems of law and justice fail to serve the intelligent human society, since humans, their families, and the entire intelligent human society that humans were supposed to form, maintain, and develop throughout life and throughout the world are of the third intelligent level of development. While all consensual systems of government along with all ideological and algorithmic research are of the first consensual level, failing humans dreadfully, with all consequences that you notice today and throughout history. Since as you may notice, it is never about communism versus capitalism in the world, or tyranny versus democracy, since these are first level consensual social ideologies found below the third intelligent human level.

And therefore, if you do not learn to reason independently at the third intelligent human level, nobody will ever teach you to do so, in order to remain weak and exploitable. Because social hierarchies lead to discrimination, servitude, and exploitation. And now this is your life, hierarchic and competitive, but very little harmonious, regardless if you are positioned higher or lower in the social hierarchy.

And it is not a matter of choice, persistence, or of self-discipline, to prioritize third level human needs against second level animal needs, against first level consensual needs, or against zero level addictions, because many times, it does not depend on you the conscious intelligence, but there are a multitude of inner, social, and higher circumstances defining your inner hierarchy of needs. And it is meaningful to identify them continuously throughout life and throughout the world, or you lose your humanity, and the entire world.

And how exactly can you undergo an intelligent human existence, at the intelligent human level? You simply prioritize your third level intelligent human needs, meanings, and fulfillment. Yet there are many details to consider, even at the third intelligent human level, or you end up unfulfilled continuously, and therefore meaningless and in failure, again.

For example, just take a random book to read right now, force yourself to read it for the rest of the day, and you go mad or you get in trouble. Because random books and random learning are irrelevant, wasting your time and effort, and you are punished. Even systematic learning and systematic development remain irrelevant, by reading all books starting with the letter A this entire week, followed by all books starting with the letter B the next week, and then the ones with C, since you go insane or you get in trouble again.

Because this is not what you are supposed to learn according to your needs coming from your own cognitive system, or from your own family, society, regime, or entourage. While your loved ones, entourage, superiors, and authorities never forgive you now, since you have failed fulfilling their needs continuously.

It is the same with grocery shopping and cooking, because regardless of how much you enjoy them, you cannot remain engaged in these activities continuously, or you go mad again, since you have to do whatever you are supposed to do according to all your inner, outer, and higher circles of interconnectivity. Yet in this comprehensive constraint, you still have your own choice, and therefore you may always follow your own hierarchy or harmony of fulfillment, but only if you know very well what you do.

And to make everything more complex, you are only one, and you cannot do everything at once. Since this is why everyone stands in line in the inner, outer, and higher worlds waiting for you to serve them, and this is exactly how hierarchies of needs are formed. Since it is similar within you, with your inner hierarchies of needs and intelligences, if this happens to be all that you are capable to identify and understand. As it is the case in the outside world with everybody else throughout the major social hierarchies of power shaping and reshaping the world continuously exactly as you know it, if this happens to be the only manner in which they are capable to identify themselves and interact socially. Or they may interconnect consistently to form genuine social harmonies, working alongside you throughout the entire fulfillment. While this is the intelligent human society, currently missing.

Yet as we have seen, hierarchies of needs can be different, since your needs for grocery shopping, cooking, and eating, may end up at the top of your hierarchy of needs during famines. And it is highly important that your hierarchy of needs is shaped in this manner, with your need to eat prioritized now, only to save your life during food shortages.

There is more to study here, related to your two spheres of interconnectivity, to your cells, intelligences, society, modes of society, and with the Consensual Matrix. Yet for now, we may be able to distinguish the multitude of hierarchies of needs that may form on their own throughout your inner and outer environments.

And right now, your subconscious is already forming a favorable hierarchy of needs, just for you, meant to match your current environment and opportunities, having your need for learning on top of the hierarchy, with all lower level needs at the bottom. All being subdued by you the conscious intelligence, now involved in consistent learning.

This is your current hierarchy of needs, having your needs placed in increased order by levels of development or by other circumstances, depending on your inner and outer conditions.

For example, right now, you may have your addictions on the bottom of your current hierarchy of needs, prioritized by your first level needs, which are your consensual, servitude, legal, ideological, then by your second level animal needs, as your eating, recovery, reproductive, security, and social needs, and then prioritized by your third level needs, which are your intelligent human needs, as your need for higher learning and development, along with your needs for righteousness, justice, equality, art, knowledge, prosperity, interconnectivity, and wellbeing in the world.

And this is your current hierarchy of needs, formed and followed only throughout favorable environments. Because only throughout favorable times and favorable environments you are kept within favorable modes of life. Otherwise, throughout unfavorable times and environments, you are switched to any of your unfavorable modes of life, as it happens during severe famine. The hierarchy of your needs may change then in any manner, depending on the environment, depending on your ability and specialization, and depending on the ability of all intelligences comprising your cognitive system, since they are the ones choosing your modes of life, according to their own specific interconnectivity.

Your current hierarchy of needs is favorable because it is possible only when the environment is favorable, allowing higher developmental needs and fulfillment. As it is the case throughout times of prosperity, and not throughout shortages, depressions, natural calamities, wars, pandemics, or recessions.

And you always receive your higher level developmental needs throughout good times, because your body and mind must have higher abilities and accurate knowledge for you to be able to fulfill your needs.

And this is how you learn and develop whenever the environment is favorable, allowing it. Otherwise, you have to find your way throughout crises, calamities, and shortages, so forget about higher development then.

While higher, intelligent human development is just as necessary as basic survival, allowing you to live your life at the intelligent human level. Because only at the intelligent human level, alongside an entire developed human society, you are capable to predict and detect all crisis, shortages, and calamities, and therefore you do not have to go through them in the first place.

Because if you cannot fulfill your needs, or if you do not know how to fulfill your needs, it can make the difference between life and death, between health and sickness, or between freedom and servitude. And in this manner, other needs become prioritized then, as recovery needs during pandemics, or security needs during wars and centralized regimes, or servitude needs during invasions or dictatorships, or eating needs during draughts and severe recessions, or reproductive needs during massive death, extinction, eradication, and therefore depopulation.

Yet during normal times, and throughout normal, favorable environments, we may distinguish by now a hierarchy of needs having the higher level needs on top, and the lower level needs at the bottom. Or this should be the case, because when you look around, you cannot find it, besides the continuous, first level servitude within the Masses and Brotherhood, along with the zero level addiction accompanying it continuously.

During unfavorable times it is different, since higher level needs have to wait, in favor of lower level physiological needs, which have to be fulfilled immediately, or you die. Because needs are more or less possible to fulfill, and it always depends on inner and outer circumstances. When it is difficult or impossible to fulfill needs, we may refer to it as an unfavorable environment, and we encounter hierarchies of needs with specific, specialized lower level needs prioritized at the top, and with higher level needs neglected toward the bottom of the hierarchy.

It is significant to notice how, throughout unfavorable times and environments, humans form entire natural social hierarchies matching their modes of life and inner hierarchies of needs and fulfillment. And in this manner, the people who are more capable in society advance at the top of the natural social harmony, with the rest of the people following according to their pertinence and abilities, within natural, intelligent human social harmonies. And this may happen even in your community, during calamities, with everybody helping everybody yet in a specialized manner, with the more pertinent and more capable people prioritized in the entire community.

This is how hierarchies of needs follow social hierarchies or social harmonies closely. While this is the case because human beings are part simultaneously of the two inner and outer spheres of interconnectivity studied above, many times matching and synchronizing them harmoniously, if they know how.

Or this is supposed to be the case within societies, because the current human society is consensual and hierarchic, which means that it already has a very rigid and very well defined hierarchy of power instated, according to wealth, politics, crimes, and personal agendas and agreements. And this is the case because the current society is consensual but not human nor natural, and this harms the world.

Living beings, and therefore living human beings live life in the natural, real, objective world, where they fulfil their normal, natural, objective needs, as eating needs, recovery needs, reproductive needs, security needs, social needs, and developmental needs. Yet humans do not live life individually, but they live life among other humans. And this is how humans either stand in their way while fulfilling their needs, or they cooperate in harmony for a greater success. Or they may also profit from others, for their own success, since there are many types of interconnectivity, as parasitic, hierarchic, random, harmonic, centralized, neutral, egalitarian, charitable, or sacrificial.

However, living beings do not live life only in one environment, as anyone may assume, but they live life in a multitude of worlds and environments, even simultaneously. For example, you may find yourself within your natural, material, real, objective environment at home, while sitting in your armchair. While you live simultaneously within your inner world or inner environment, which is cognitive and subjective, where you have to reason consistently as you read this book.

You may assume that you are reasoning more now than usually, which means that you exist more subjectively, in your mind, through your intelligences and conscious inner selves, within your inner world. And if you lose track of time too, it means that you exit entirely your outer, real, objective environment while reading, only to be able to focus your attention within, and therefore enhancing your reasoning within your inner mind world. With all cars, dogs, music, and the rest of the outside noise getting in your way, and keeping you in the outside world unfocused, causing you to lose your attention. Because now you have to consider all needs coming from all your selves found in all your worlds and realities, since you always add these to your hierarchies and harmonies of needs and fulfillment.

But these are not your only environments, worlds, or realities, since you also undergo your existence in the Consensual Matrix, which is yet another world or reality of yours. It is a consensual environment this time, made of corporations, laws, jurisdictions, money, courts, taxes, identity cards, licenses, lawyers, bank accounts, certificates, duties, assignments, permits, lodges, ideologies, privileges, judges, beliefs, theories, stamps, degrees, signatures, registration numbers, politicians, districts, trials, and codes of law. Taking your entire life too.

While for each one of your worlds and environments, inner, real, social, family, or consensual, you have a different set of needs, which may be cognitive, natural, artificial, consensual, social, academic, ideological, employed, or military. Yet regardless of the multitude of environments that you occupy simultaneously, and regardless of the multitude of sets of needs that you receive from each one of your separate environments, you always form intrinsically and extrinsically only one hierarchy or harmony of needs including them. And you do so for the simple fact that you are only one individual, holding only one consciousness, and therefore capable to fulfill consciously only one need at the time. You may also double task at times, under specific circumstances, yet even then, you are mostly aided by other selves and intelligences. Which means that, as a conscious intelligence, you still fulfill only one need at a time, only one task at a time, only one line of reasoning at a time, or only one assignment at a time.

Your consensual needs and consensual environments come with their own laws, beliefs, jurisdictions, and sets of consensual needs called duties, orders, or assignments. And while you fulfill these needs, you are not alone, but you interconnect with those around and with the environment, forming genuine hierarchic consensual hierarchies of interconnectivity,