Torrey Orton – July 27, 2009
I’m partial to the view that life is for fulfilling human needs, if we know what they are. Ah, if we know! We know that they change over time, that some are not available to direct inspection, that they emerge often under a veil or obscured in the stream of other needs which dominate daily life… we know, thus, that we cannot know them until we have them at a certain level of intensity, salience, etc. And we are expected, and expect, to pursue our needs politely, temperately, considerately, as well as focussedly, commitedley, all to pass through flowingly...to happinesses again.
We are in a world of intemperate processes and outrageous wants, often disconnected from substantive needs, whose momentum generates unnecessary activity that reinforces itself. Talk about moral degeneration…For in this world our needs are distorted, reconfigured, powered and bustled by waves of energy we often cannot even feel until their infectious power grips us. We discover needs by the emergence of new behaviours…sometimes discussed as trends or megatrends, the fashionable material of second rate sociology sustaining consumption-driven marketing to create new ‘needs’ like this:
Commercial self-indoctrination?
Rashid’s commercial self-indoctrination story – told to me one day at lunch.
He and Safiya went to the optometrist’s to get her new eye test done. After she went through, the staffer asked R. if he wanted to have an eye test, too.
He said no, no problems reading or anything else, thanks.
She said it’s free on Medicare, just have a try…maybe…
OK, he said, and so he did have them tried. There was a slight shortfall in tasks like reading.
So, R. accepted that he needed glasses. Why? Because the test said so, though he did not feel any need of them until he heard the test results. If the test said so, there must be something. He found it a day or two later (before getting his first glasses) when noticing that some things seemed a little blurred while reading…Voila, commercial self-indoctrination.
A few days later he added by email, speaking of the above rendition of our chat:
“It’s nice and accurate T. However; after wearing my new glasses few days now, I do feel that I really needed them!! Power of commercial self-indoctrination getting stronger by the day :)”
I love vindication. However, R replied to my reply to the above:
“Somehow I don’t want you to post the story, and when I inquire into the nature of my resistance I hear two things. One seems to do with resisting public self-disclosure on the net and leaving digital crumbs and the other is to do with knowing now that actually the glasses are medically useful to me. While I could read even relatively small prints but wearing glasses now I notice that I was subjecting my eyes to quite a bit of stress! It also has an undercurrent of denying that “commercial self-indoctrination” could happen to me. “
So, it’s a very delicate business, this emerging needs / wants one. Now I understand what a marketing friend has often tried to get me to see – what a serious business it is, too, fooling as it does with the boundaries between acknowledged needs with hairextension-like retro-fitting of them to the latest thing, fashion, trend, innovation – all the materials of consumptionous wellbeing.
Expressive need
Here’s a quite other kind of need – an emerging need for ‘negative’ self-expression which I wrote in a post entitled Popular anger denied makes way for populists a few months ago.
A small example of displaced anger: in our house we intensely dislike phone solicitations for charity or sales, with slightly less animus for the charity than the sale, and greatly more for those who just want to ask a few questions as a cover for a sale by marketing slime!! I’ve placed us on the national not-to-be-called register and things keep coming, especially around dinner time. One of these happened yesterday from a charity. I called back today to ask them to take us off the call list (we give regularly by mail). I was rougher in tone and barely withheld anger than she deserved, except that they are the latest in a running series of these things which seem unstoppable. I did not know when I picked up the phone to call that I was actively angry. I was and she got a bit of it (I do the same to males – gender free aggressiveness).
This need is for expression of experience. People need to do this. Just when and how much is a personal and social question. Unvented anger is an internal stressor; lots of little ones may make a big explosion – a rage. We all know that withheld anger or irritation builds, often to be inappropriately expressed on the wrong person(s) (often at greater distance and of less power than ourselves); or, expressed to the appropriate person(s) but well over the top of the immediate cue that sets it off. Inappropriate after all. This comes from the arena of perceived injustice or unfairness, a capacity which it seems all humans have (for personal detection of injustice, that is). Accessing emerging perceptions of injustice is a core skill for a competent person and a competent social system. Prevention of inappropriate blow-ups is one reason for getting better at it. Another is to rectify emerging injustices.
Getting a grip on emergences, separating the real from the false, the liberating from the enslaving, is one of the major challenges of our turbulent times where standards and process of all kinds are up for grabs. The challenge is personal, familial, social, political…multilevel, multi-sectoral…all happening at once.
A sense of need, but what need?
A third potential example of the emerging, and a difficult one to even present, is this: I have a sense that there is a new level of intellectual / spiritual activity, a kind of desperate expressiveness coming from every type of existing socio-political paradigm across all domains of human activity (all those which are disordered, distressed, displaced by turbulence) as if they are gearing up for a fight and want to get on the field of influence or battle early. Perhaps it is just a flowering of new expression liberated by the turbulence – change is good for innovation, encourages it, demands it. My sense is that we are entering a new phase of activity.
So, join me in discovering and disclosing emergences of all kinds…we certainly can’t tell now which ones matter for the future. Refining our detection capabilities will count for the future, since some of the emerging needs / wants will be thematic in the future.
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