Comment by vsingh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vsingh | Hacker News Reader

The "Chinese mother" approach to raising children is based around motivations at the second-highest level of Maslow's hierarchy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maslow%27s_Hierarchy_of_Ne...

While this aggressive approach to parenting can be made to sound right on a certain dispassionate level, to some people it just feels intensely wrong in a way that's hard to explain. Why is that?

What happens is that children raised to heavily optimize "Esteem" have a hard time switching gears into "Self-actualization". It's no surprise that the "Chinese mother" disallows her child from starring in the school play. That would be a means of self-expression; it would throw a monkey wrench in the whole works.

I've found many times in life that in order to self-actualize further, I've had to give up things that others praised. I think that in quitting Google and joining a startup (despite her parents' likely disapproval), the author has taken a big step towards self-actualization.

This is not intended to exactly disagree: Many times when people cite the Maslow hierarchy, they often to take it as an axiom that the hierarchy is completely exactly how people work, and to lead better lives, people must go about fulfilling exactly these needs in this order.

As someone who presumably subscribes to the hierarchy, would you agree that you seem fairly certain that this is how it works? And, if so, can you say why?

At minimum, I'd say that it's not obvious to me that the order specified by the hierarchy is really in evidence. For example, I believe I've witnessed a fair number of people I'd say were self-actualized and esteemed who are fairly short on the friendship/family/sexual-intimacy front.

No, I do not believe in a strict order imposed by the hierarchy. My view, which I've come to through studying both Maslow's Hierarchy and Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration, is that you're able to operate at the highest level you've so far achieved during your lifetime, even if one of the lower levels is missing. For example, one who had all five levels fulfilled during childhood will be capable of self-actualization in later life even during periods of physical or fiscal insecurity.

What's the point of a "hierarchy" then, if the "upper" levels do not depend on the "lower" ones? Basically what you're saying here is a tautology: one is able to operate at a "level" that, well, one is able to operate at.

It's clear that vsingh claims that you need to fulfill the lower levels to reach the higher ones for the first time.

Some clarifications:

1. Presumably you don't have to satisfy everything in each level to be considered satisfying that level; otherwise if your entire family dies in a plane crash, you can never achieve MH3 again, and if you never got MH5 before that, you're permanently fucked.

2. If you get to MH4, but then your town gets hit by a neutron bomb, killing your wife, family, and friends, you get your MH3 knocked out, but your MH1, MH2, and MH4 are all still intact (MH4 because you telecommute most of the time, so your career is intact). Are you immediately eligible for MH5, or do you have to regenerate your MH3 first?

3. Interesting corner case: Say you get to MH3 by virtue of being raised in a rich American family. At age 18, you fly somewhere to visit a college by yourself, and your entire city gets blown away by a neutron bomb. You now have no friends or family, but life insurance on your family pays off handsomely, so you are at MH2. You decide to become a soulless driven businessman, and you do fine; you get promoted, everybody respects your competence, you respect other people's competence, etc, but you have no friends and no companionship. It would appear that you have reached MH4, but you never got there while you had MH3; does this count as MH4? Or do you deny the possibility of this scenario? (I made it up, so that's perfectly valid.)

(These are not leading questions; I'm curious as to how the Maslow viewpoint deals with corner cases.)

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