Lemme See You Get Maslow: Stayin' Alive, Stayin' Alive

I often wonder how people decide what is important to them.

I mean, I’m not talking about important in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word.  Biology has been thoughtful enough to provide us with a pretty clear set of parameters in this regard.  We need:

-          Food to act as fuel for the Meat Machine within which we are all trapped.  This fuel has spawned major industries and several minor celebrities, and I for one am a big fan of it.

-          Clothing to act as a means for said Meat Machine to regulate its own temperature over a wider range.  Note that we can survive without clothes, it’s just a lot harder to do so.  (And a lot more embarrassing when shopping for food)

-          Sleep to allow the Meat Machine to perform maintenance.  Even South Africa’s less-than-competent electricity parastatal organization has noted that you cannot maintain a machine of any kind of complexity without switching it off.

-          The means to sleep in safety, and the means to shield ourselves from elemental extremes that clothing cannot handle.  Scientists call this “shelter”, you and I call it “a house”, and real estate agents call this “the means to steal from anyone who doesn’t have their wallet glued to their thigh”

(Giant parentheses:  One item that is kind of half-on, half-off here is sex.  Sex is not necessary for the survival of the individual – No matter how teenage boys around the world feel – but it is necessary for the survival of the species.  So we do kind of have to include it, because if your parents didn’t have the kind of careless sex that they warn you about in school, you wouldn’t be searching for food.  However, you won’t die without making your own children.  End giant parentheses)

And even with regards to the above list, two of the parameters are kind of optional.  You can survive without clothes or a house – And many, many people around the world find themselves having to do so, sadly – but these things do make survival easier. 

These things are so necessary that many of our key behaviours evolved to ensure they were met.  Testosterone was the tool by which nature gifted us the means to develop enough muscle and aggression to be stupid enough to try and attack animals ten times our size with nothing more than pointed sticks and bad intentions.  Oestrogen – Yes, there is an “O” in it, hit F7 if you don’t believe me – was the way to be calm and rational enough to raise children without eating them.  And a host of other mechanisms have been put in place to ensure that we ensure that our basic survival requirements are met.

But:  We have advanced as species to the point that most of the above needs are taken care of for a large swathe of our number, without us having to risk life and limb.  Food arrives in shops pre-killed, water arrives in our shelter without the necessity of trekking through bad terrain, and we don’t have to risk death to borrow the skin of a nearby animal without permission in order to be clothed.  Thus, instincts that developed over millennia have, in a few centuries, become obsolete.  But they haven’t disappeared, as the re-wiring to the hardware in the Meat Machine that drives these behaviours still hasn’t occurred.  (My personal opinion is that it will never occur, as the changes required to remove these instincts impact so many of the Meat Machine’s delicately balanced systems that removing them will result in disaster)  So, we find other ways to indulge them, because, well, we have to.  Programming is programming, whether we like it or not. 

This is why we have contact sports and interior designers.  This is why we have target ranges and Mills & Boon novels.  This is why every movie that you watch that isn’t a horror movie or aimed at kids is about love or a great adventure or both.  (The ones that are about neither get relegated to art nouveau film festivals and watched by people that are only friends with other people who go to festivals like that)  This is why the very concept of the helmet was invented, and why we seek to live vicariously through that one friend who is brave/crazy enough to go bungee jumping.  This is why three-quarters of articles in modern magazines are about relationships.  Men are driven to risk death in stupid and embarrassing ways to make up the “hunter” part of the “hunter-gatherer” complex, and women are driven to protect and nurture and feather the nest to make up the rest.

And these drives, these irresistible urges, have caused us as a species to direct our gaze at some pretty bizarre things.  They are occasionally augmentations to the above impulses, but usually they are substitutes, non-lethal means for the Meat Machine to fulfil the drives that inhabit it to its very core.  But they are definitely not things that a caveman would have any use for.

Over the next few weeks, I’m gonna examine some of these things.  Pull them apart and see why we consider them important, even if they don’t directly fill our stomachs or keep the rain off our heads.  I have the luxury of doing this simply because my days are not full of desperate attempts to strike large herbivores in the head with a rock so I can eat them.  Since you own a PC, I assume you are in a similar position, and if you’re reading this then you’re just as bored as I am.  So, let’s explore these notions together, shall we?