From: Erin N. (enoonan@kent.edu)
Date: Sat Jul 12 2003 - 22:51:43 BST
>===== Original Message From moq_discuss@moq.org =====
>Erin all MOQers:
>
>Erin wrote:
>I know this hierarchy has been compared to Maslow's self-actualization/
>hierarchy of needs, where lower needs need to be met for further needs. I
>mean supposedly the unabomber was an intelligent mathematician but he's not
>really on my top 10 list of most moral people,...
>
>dmb says:
>The unabomber, I think, pretty well demonstrates what Maslow and so many
>others have found. Although he was brilliant in some ways, the man was also
>quite damaged. As an infant he was stuck with an illness that prevented all
>human contact for an extended period of time. Certain basic emotional needs
>went unmet in a critical developmental period. Its no accident that one
>damaged by isolation should find himself alone in woods or that he should
>have adopted such a malicious attitude toward society in general. He's
>damaged goods and can't even rightly adopt social values, let alone
>intellectual values. He was living in a world of static patterns all his
>own. He was nuts.
Erin:
Well putting people in the mentally ill category
is what many people did to Pirsig. Doesn't help
clarify at all.
I don't think what Pirsig is saying is exactly like
what Maslow was saying, that was the point of my
post. I agree with Steve about the types of people/
types of pattern complaint.
BOEREE: Another point is that he asks that we pretty much take care of our
lower needs before self-actualization comes to the forefront. And yet we can
find many examples of people who exhibited at very least aspects of
self-actualization who were far from having their lower needs taken care of.
Many of our best artists and authors, for example, suffered from poverty, bad
upbringing, neuroses, and depression. Some could even be called psychotic!
If you think about Galileo, who prayed for ideas that would sell, or
Rembrandt, who could barely keep food on the table, or Toulouse Lautrec, whose
body tormented him, or van Gogh, who, besides poor, wasn’t quite right in the
head, if you know what I mean... Weren’t these people engaged in some form of
self-actualization? The idea of artists and poets and philosophers (and
psychologists!) being strange is so common because it has so much truth to it!
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