Tag Archives: Needs

Trust and Having Three Locks on the Door

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I was looking out of my window, staring into the night, and saw my neighbor returning to her home from – what seemed to have been – a late night walk. She opened her door and – when she was inside – closed it. She not only closed it, but she locked it as well: with three separate locks. But why did she do that? Why three locks? Why not merely one or two? The answer is as simple as it is frightening: because we can’t trust each other. We don’t know what other people’s plans are. We might have worked hard in order to buy our flatscreen television, but others might have another interpretation of what “working hard” consists of. Robbing a middle-aged woman is – after all – not as easy as it might look.

This morning I went to the grocery store. In front of me, in the queue, stood an old lady. She was paying for her groceries, by pin. When she was about to enter her pin-code, she threw a look at me: a suspicious look. A look as if I would rob her of her pin-pass, if only I would have the chance.

I was going on holiday with a couple of friends of mine, and we were booking a flight. When the point came at which one of us had to pay for the flight up front, assuming that the others would pay him back at a later point in time, each one of us hesitated to take the offer.

If you want to trust someone, you better share your secrets with one person only, and that person is yourself. And even that person isn’t fully reliable. Even that person might come to change his mind and break his part of the deal. Because the “you of tomorrow” might have different needs than the “you of today”. While the “you of today” might intend to save money in order to pay for his education, the “you of tomorrow” might really like to buy that MacBook.

People have different interests, and different means for satisfying these interests. While some might be good in football and make tons of money with it, others might be good in carpentry and make not so much money with it. And some people don’t know where they’re good at, so they decide to make use of those who know where they’re good at. And although we can’t blame anyone for not having the required means at his disposal, we might doubt the morality of those who (ab)use the talents of others.

But what if morality would be a talent too? What if, just like soccer and carpentry, morality is just another quality ingrained – or not ingrained – in a person’s nature? Are we then still allowed to blame those whom seemingly lack this sense of morality? Or is this just the way they are, are they just using their “moral means” at full power? Or what if morality is only reserved for the few lucky ones? The ones who can afford to be moral, because they possess all the resources allowing them to live a moral life? Isn’t morality a luxury, like a MacBook or a mobile phone? A secondary need, only relevant for those who have passed the first layers on the survival-ladder?

Maybe…but it’s still a good idea to lock your doors.

But what do you think?

Longing for Dominance and Loving Dogs

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Do you want people to obey you, or do you want them to be independent? Do you want people to nod and do as you say, or do you want people to be able to stand their ground? Do you want unconditional love, or do you value the whims of individuality? In other words: are you a dog-person, or are you a cat-person?

Each morning, afternoon and evening, millions of people are walking their dog: they are pulling the cord that connects them to their most loyal follower. They are yelling at the little creature like there is no tomorrow: ‘Max, don’t shit there!,’ ‘Sit! No, sit!’, ‘Listen to me!’. Why would you ever want a creature like that? To keep such a creature on a leash, while everything in nature screams that dogs aren’t meant to be kept on a leash. So why then do it?

You could also choose a cat, a night-walker, able to save his own ass in every situation. A creature whose nature it is to wander around through life, purposeless and autonomous. Not obeying anyone, just doing as he pleases. An entrepreneur following his instincts, grabbing each opportunity to satisfy his needs. Not interested in your validation, just in his own. Only caring about you in so far as you give him what he wants. The perfect citizen in this capitalistic constellation of ours.

Communism or capitalism. Dogs versus cats. Men is born to dominate: be it in communism or otherwise. We feel superior by watching others crave for our attention, hoping for us to come and rescue them. It makes us feel important. This is a universal need. That means that, if we can’t fulfill this need in our everyday working lives, we need to find different options for satisfying this need. We need to express our dominance in another way. We can do this by beating our wives, rebelling against society or by taking care of a creature that is fully dependent on us. A creature that, even if it wants to take shit, needs our approval to do so.

Do people with dogs have to compensate for something? For a feeling of powerlessness, disobedience, or any other sense of inferiority they experience in their daily lives? A need to execute their dominance, if not over human, then at least over an animal? ‘But he is so sweet,’ ‘He is always happy and wiggles his tail when I come home.’ That might be true, but do you want a creature longing for your validation? You don’t want a spouse that obeys you, no matter what you request, do you? Not if you can also have an independent soul, able to live a life on its own, even when you are not there to grant your permission.

Power structures are everywhere: even in our relation to our pets. Marx (and Darwin) would be jealous.

But what do you think?

An Application of Freud’s Theory of Mind

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Everyone must have heard of the name ‘Sigmund Freud‘ at some point in their lives. Thinking about the name, there might be all kinds of images popping up in your mind: things like the mind being like an iceberg, notions like ‘The Id’ and ‘The Ego’, and Freud’s ideas about sex as the explanation for pretty much everything we do. But you might not fully remember all of it. You could say that the ideas might be floating around somewhere between your consciousness and your unconsciousness – to speak in Freudian terminology. But what was it exactly that Freud claimed? And why do many philosophers of science condemn his theories to the realm of ‘pseudo-science’? And what’s the value of Freud’s ideas? Let’s apply Freud’s ideas to an everyday situation and find it for ourselves.

Let’s imagine that you are a guy that goes out with some friends. You guys are ‘chilling in the club’, while suddenly an absolutely gorgeous woman enters the room. You notice a certain feeling taking control over your body: attraction, the feeling of you wanting – in whatever sense defined – that woman. This is not a feeling for which you might necessarily have arguments. No, the feeling is just there. This feeling comes down from the part of your personality that Freud calls ‘The Id‘. The only thing that The Id cares about is receiving pleasure, loads of it. It has an inextinguishable urge to grab on to everything within its reach, just for it to calm down its perpetual longing for pleasure; no matter how briefly the satisfaction might last.

You can imagine that society would be a rather chaotic institution if every one of us would just give into his animalistic urges at all times. The notion of rape would become little different from our custom of shacking hands. Therefore some basic rules of conduct need to be ingrained in each member of society: ‘Be gentle to others,’ ‘Help an old lady cross the street’ and ‘Don’t have sex with someone else unless that someone wants to’. It is within this domain of ‘The Superego‘ that all kinds of religious and political beliefs nestle. Beliefs that will guide you in living your life like a caged monkey.

Surely: it’s all nice that we are trying to control our animalistic urges by coming up with a set of reasonable rules. But who makes sure that the needs of The Id and the rules of The Superego are properly matched? After all, as we have just seen, they might contradict each other. So we can’t always satisfy both at the same time: we can’t just rape everyone and be a gentleman at the same time. And that’s where ‘The Ego‘ comes in. The Ego is the controlling power, the power that tries to satisfy the needs of The Id while taking account of the rules of The Superego. The Ego is the house of reason, of the economically thinking part of you; the part that decides to fulfill the most pressing urges first – like the urge to still our hunger – and postpone not so pressing urges – like the urge to have sex – to a point in time at which satisfying this urge might be more ‘appropriate’.

Now you can understand why Freud sees our sexual drives as the prime reason for all our psychological problems, right? After all, it isn’t easy to suppress our animalistic needs, put forward by The Id. That can only be done by repressing the beast that lives inside of us. Or, to put it more boldly, the beast that we simply are. But taming the beast does not make it fall asleep. The beast is still there, waiting for his opportunity to come. And when it comes, he unleashes his true nature. So we have to do everything within our power to shackle the beast, everything in order for us to live a ‘reasonable’ life.

There are – and have been – many criticisms about the scientific status of Freud’s ideas, and you might see why. It’s after all quite difficult to capture something as intangible as ‘The Id‘ in terms of empirical data. Nonetheless, Freud’s ideas have found to be very influential within the domain of psychiatry, even though the current generation of psychology students hardly learns anything about them.

Ah well, scientific or not, it’s still a pretty fascinating point of view, right? Oh, and for the guy at the bar: he took the girl home.

But what do you think?