Compare And Contrast Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs

Aldous Huxley did not trust technology along with everyone else in the 1930s. In 1960, in an interview, Huxley even suggested that the government was mind-controlling us and that soon we would end up just like in Brave New World ¬¬¬– powerless and under control of a higher authority. It is a bit funny how then people would laugh at technology, say it was stupid, and now technology users laugh at traditional forms of communication. Having that said, Huxley created the fictional drug, that I am pretty sure we all would wish for our own dose sometimes, called soma. While analyzing the effects of soma, I concluded that they were very similar to Abraham Maslow 's hierarchy of needs. Along with this drug came hypnopaedia that sounded, "Everybody

Abraham Maslow was a psychologist in the 1940s that wanted to find out what made people do certain things; what incentives motivated them to reach their needs. There are five levels to this theory: physiological, safety, social, esteem, and self-actualization. This model suggests that in order to ultimately reach happiness one must be content with the level below in order to move up. Beginning from the bottom of the pyramid, the first tier is physiological which advocates the need for food, sleep, water, air, etc. – the basic components of life. For example, Maslow wrote in a paper that explain his theory, “What this means specifically is, that in the human being who is missing everything in life in an extreme fashion, it is most likely that the major motivation would be the physiological needs rather than any others,” (Maslow 374). In Brave New World, soma is a physiological need that is most prominent. We see this when Bernard is telling Lenina his feelings, something considered wrong and depressing, “Why you don’t take soma when you have these dreadful ideas of yours. You’d forget all about them. And instead of feeling miserable, you’d be jolly. So jolly,” (Huxley 62). Everyone is happy when taking soma which meets the requirement of satisfaction on the first level on the

The esteem level is the most crucial level of all when one reaches it. Here you have to be strong and acquire self-respect otherwise it is back to level one. In the words of Maslow, “Satisfaction of the self-esteem need leads to feelings of self-confidence, worth, strength, capability and adequacy of being useful and necessary in the world,” (Maslow 382). In brief, when a person respects themselves wholly, inside and out, they are ready for self-actualization. Sometimes people cannot go past this level because they are afraid of coming off as smug and then they begin to feel vain and small. The esteem level is all about wanting to exceed true happiness. If everyone knew that this was not form of arrogance, maybe we would all be at the top of the pyramid, but that would be highly unlikely since there is no true