Of Need

What is need?
One way of defining it is that which you can’t survive without.
A person can survive without almost anything, at least for a time.
A person can survive without air, at least for a few minutes.
A person can survive without water, for a few days.
A person can survive without food, for a few weeks or months, depending on their circumstances and constitution.
Sooner or later thou, you have to have some of the following, or you’ll die.
Another such need is warmth.

All these could be called intrinsic needs, because they’re direct needs, as opposed to things we have to to get, like money, at least in this society, in order to get the things we need to get, like all of the above.
Money itself is not a need, but it can be used to attain something that is.
What’re some other extrinsic needs?
Another one is power, physical and mental.
Physical and mental power is something we’re born with, but it’s also something we must attain.
Some people are born with more potential than others, but that potential must be actualized.
While physical and mental exercise, especially rigorous, may not be needs, they can help us maintain our minds and bodies in optimal condition, which can extend our life expectancy, as well as help us attain the things we need, so long as we don’t exert ourselves excessively.

All these could also be called physical needs.
Is there such a thing as psychological needs?
If there is, I would say it’s when you need something so badly, mentally, emotionally, that you’re prepared to risk life and limb in order to get it, or end your life, if you can’t.
Some psychological needs can help us in attaining our physical needs, like our need to socialize can help us find a job we can use to put food on the table, or in socializing, we might get some advice on how to eat better, in order to extend life expectancy, or on how to avoid danger.
Other mental and emotional needs can be detrimental, like again our need to socialize, in some circumstances, we might hang out with the wrong crowd, with fools, psychopaths or psychotics, or on the other hand, we might make an ass of ourselves, because we crave attention, which may only further alienate us, or worse, cause other people to want to hurt us.

All these could also be called positive needs, because they’re things you have to do, or have, as oppose to things you have to not do, or have.
What’re some negative needs?
An obvious one is the need not to avoid physical danger.
Another is to not smoke… or is that a need?
While smoking itself will not kill you instantly, it will reduce your life expectancy, but so will a lot of things, and it’s difficult to say to what degree, you could die quickly of something else long before smoking and its adverse effects accumulate and compound to the point where you wind up with cancer, hear disease, or some other terminal illness.
So is avoiding intoxicating substances like smoking a need?
While a few smokes a day may not impact your health in any significant way, depending on your constitution, I suppose you could say it only becomes a need to quit after years of heavy and prolonged abuse, where you’re at high risk for developing a terminal illness, or at least a chronic, serious and severely debilitating one.
Smoking can creep up on you thou, on the surface of things you may seem perfectly healthy, especially to the unobservant person, but just underneath, you could be at risk for stroke, because your arteries have been clogged with lethal carcinogens.
We may call such needs like the need not to smoke or drink in excess, gradual needs, because if you don’t die in a freak accident, it’s only a matter of time before they kill you, but it also really depends of an individual, there are some people who’re heavy smokers and drinkers but end up dying in their 80s or 90s, of a nonsmoking/drinking related illness, or just of senescence.

Now that I’ve talked a bit about what need is, and some of the various sorts, I’m coming more to the point of this thread.
When someone asks us, what’s most important in life, what do we tell them?
The materialist will tell you wealth is the most important, especially monetary wealth/all manner of gizmos and gadgets, toys and trinkets, an aesthetically pleasing house, vehicle and so on.
The Nietzschean will tell you both mental and physical power is the most important, the ability to instill both awe and fear in others, achievement and success, and the psychological and physical tools, the virtues necessary to attain them.
The hedonist will at once say to you delicious food, or sex and drugs.
Your yoga instructor will tell you health and fitness.
The bohemian might say art, the nerd science, the monk God, and the hermit wisdom.
And others might say justice, and others still, might say romantic love, or platonic.
While all of these things are important on some level, more/less depending on the persons preferences and deficiencies, ultimately and arguably the most important thing in life is the word that’s in the title of this thread - need.

Needs come in all shapes and sizes, but the most important needs are physical, and these are also the things that’re really the most painful to do without, usually, and for good reason.
It’s why we torture people with pins and needles or starvation rather than name calling, and while isolation can be painful, it’s nowhere near as so as say, what the iceman Richard Kuklinsky did to his victims.
Social, sexual or romantic isolation may compound to the point where it is unbearable, and one is tempted to suicide, but physical torture is instantly unbearable, so much so that a few days, a couple of hours even, depending on ones physical and psychological fortitude, could succumb one to shock death or a catatonic, vegetative state, from which they may never snap out of.
This is also why moderns, who pride themselves on being humane, and not inflicting ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment on others, forbid physical torture, and not so much mental torment or isolation, because it’s not quite as bad or horrific.
The physical needs are also the most universal, we all need to eat, etcetera.

Now that’s not to say the psychological needs are not important, both intrinsically and extrinsically, because life would be insufferable without meeting them, and because they can often help us with our physical needs, there’s usually reasons why nature endowed us with this or that mental or emotional need.
All these other things, like material wealth, sensual indulgence and so on, aren’t needs at all, in the real sense and substance of the word, or only if one is totally deprived of them, to the point where one is suicidal or inconsolably depressed, or to the point where they jeopardize our physical needs in a round about way…but maybe they wouldn’t be so depressed if they saw these things in a different light, were more appreciative of what they did have, and the price, the cost, both to themselves, others, and to the environment, these things often have.
So if they’re not needs what are they?
You may call them wants, excesses, desires, luxuries, indulgence…

(There is also the need to see that others needs are taken care of, it’s a kind of need of itself, especially ones close friends and family, or the need to have a family of ones own, for that matter, we may call this altruistic need, or procreative need.)

All these psychological desires, you could say, at some point go from being genuine needs, into being desires, but this line is not always obviously crossed, it can differ dramatically for each person, and the situation they find themselves in, so it’s open to some interpretation.
But at some point, especially with the psychological needs, we move from need to desire, something we could almost just as easily, or sometimes easier, do without.
So ultimately it is needs that are really important, as opposed to the more subjective curiosity of the nerd, or the avarice of the miser.

Now all this brings me to the broader point that I want to make.
It is my theory that society has gone horribly wrong.
Because we’ve forgotten what’s really important, or we never really knew.
Nature has endowed us with all sorts of desires, and it’s good to some extent, these desires make us who we are, and many of them are often useful for our survival, directly or indirectly.
But it’s my view that human nature is badly flawed, and that the flaw is not that we have a deficiency of desire, generally speaking, but that we have an excess.
This causes us to jeopardize things we need for the sake of things we do not.
It’s not just human nature that’s corrupt, but society reinforces this corruption, rather than attempting to correct it.
It’s why civilization is on the brink, the verge of collapse, not just because of some abstraction, institution or system like capitalism, but because our values and our nature is warped.
I’d like to delve further into this corruption, here, and elsewhere.
Any feedback on topic is appreciated.

Is there a general need for spirituality?

Gloominary wrote

How is human nature badly flawed? Are you certain it’s not an unmet deficiency, a deficiency that requires self-awareness, that develops into all sorts of excessive behaviors?

Gloominezer, young child, you’ve got a lot to learn about existence…Namely what suicide, actually is…

Suicide is like a walking zombie, a female soul with no order, confused and walking slowly…It gets consumed by it’s own gravity and focuses purely inward…It is pure weakness.

Strength is being like a lion in the wild. The herd hates strength because the herd is inherently paranoid. Thus the herd uses psychological torture tactics and bans physical torture tactics (the herd’s strength relies on solely psychological brutality and has a physical weakness, thus seeks to ban physical attributes which may threaten it, whilst the lion relies on both psychological and physical brutality.)

“Ban” this, bitch!! Oh the torture.

What does it mean to survive?
To remain alive, right?

But what does it mean to be alive?
How do you define this state of being alive?

In other words, it would be useful to define life.

What if these excesses, these desires that you mention, are part of life and their removal is what we call dying?

Don’t address me as a young child, or I won’t speak to you anymore.

At some point, having more power is superfluous.
A Donald Trump say has no real advantage over a middle class person, he just has more toys to play with.
Statistically he’s not any healthier or happier.
It’s vanity, and all this excess production/consumption is ultimately ruining our health, happiness and the world in which we live.
Humanity needs alternative values.

We have too many unnecessary desires.
These desires need to either be repressed, or diverted, channeled into non-destructive activities, like what we’re doing now, going on the computer, philosophizing, art, as opposed to material production/consumption.

I’ll save the definition of life for another thread.
We don’t have to die in order to cut out the excess, we just have to relax, take it easy, not work much more than we have to, enjoy the little things, whether it’s going for a walk, or reading a book, or getting something to eat.

You don’t have to lose your vital organs in order to cut those desires that you deem to be unnecessary but you do have to cut those desires, and depending on how you define life, that may mean that a part of you, an important part of you, has to die.

What if cutting off intelligence, becoming unintelligent, is more likely to preserve your vital organs?

Would you call that life?

My question is, why do you think these desires are unnecessary and why do you think others should think in the same way?

I do agree there are unnecessary motivations or motivations that must be trimmed. However, the reason why these motivations must be trimmed may not be the same as yours.

If people are not self-aware, they tend to grasp at straws to meet their needs (which remain undiscovered to them) or resign themselves to not being satisfied. Mistaken desires lead to all sorts of empty endeavors with the end result of the person still searching for relief that is not superficial/empty. I asked about the general need for spirituality based on those unmet searches. Human companionship is one need that most people fight against to their own chagrin. Why do humans fight ties with other humans by and large?

Interesting challenge.
Is it better to be dumb and alive, or die smart?
I guess it depends, on how dumb you are.
It feels good to be intelligent, and it’s usually useful, but it’s not a necessity, so long as you’re intelligent enough to take care of yourself and your family if you have one, that’s what’s most important.
There’s a lot that goes into making us who we are besides our intelligence, physically, and psychologically, there’s our memories, if we still have those, our personality, principles and so on, our emotions.
We can still be of value to both ourselves and others, both from a subjective and utilitarian standpoint, even if we’re not geniuses, even if we’re a little slow.

However, you might be better off dead than in a persistent vegetative or a nearly persistent vegetative state.
It’s not a necessity for society to keep you alive, but a luxury, in such a state you probably wouldn’t be much good to anyone, even yourself, just a burden.
In such cases I don’t think there’s anything wrong with individuals/their families making provisions to have doctors terminate their life should their cerebral cortex become severely and irrevocably damaged.

For me, this is keeping in my line with my thinking, which I will call necessitism.
If anything about value could be called objective, it’s our needs.
These are the things which come closest to being absolute, and universal.
The physical needs are most important and pertinent, but the psychological needs are important and pertinent too, and sometimes it can be tricky to distinguish a psychological need from a want, and occasionally psychological needs might precede physical ones in priority.

In the case that you presented… well you see, society has needs too, and as social animals, barring a few completely asocial and antisocial exceptions, I think it’s a psychological need to want to be of some use to society, to be admired, to make yourself useful in some way.
While in a persistent vegetative state, on life support, you may still be alive, your physical needs may still be taken care of, it’s important to look at societies needs and not just our own, as well as our own psychological needs before we enter such a dreadful state where we’re almost completely deprived of a psychology.

While you need life support to keep you alive, society doesn’t need to give you life support, and so you are a luxury from societies standpoint, like a potted plant, but much more costly.
If a useless persons life is detracting from the needs of useful people, people who’re both more fully realized, actualized as human beings, and contributing to their own needs and the needs of society, and there’s no way to improve this useless person, than this useless person ought to be terminated, because the needs of the others outweigh the needs of any single individual.
However, if you can keep a useless individual alive, without it costing society or the environment much, than I would leave it up to individuals, and the collective, to decide, it doesn’t matter all that much either way, but from societies standpoint it’s a luxury, not a necessity.
While any single individuals life may not be too costly, since we presently have an abundance of resources, thousands, millions of such burdensome individuals could be very costly to it and to nature.
I think it’s an open ended question, how important it is to take care of others?

So you could say my necessitism has an altruistic, a reciprocal altruistic component.
It’s a hierarchy of values but there’s some overlap and probably some exceptions, but I think generally, the physical needs come first, then the psychological needs, then the wants, but we have to consider societies needs and natures too, as well as those few cases where psychological needs trump physical ones.
Still, I think this needism, this putting needs first ahead of wants is almost always a good thing, and I think we could use more of it, because the way I see it, and it’s a big subject, the biggest problem with society today, is that it has totally forgotten about necessity in its rabid, reckless and maniacal pursuit of luxury, consumerism, and it’s going to be the death of us and the death of nature, in my estimation and in the estimation of many others, increasingly.

Our problem is not that we neglect our desires, that is not our problem, so I wouldn’t worry about it.
Modern man tries to satisfy nearly every single superfluous desire that momentarily enters his head, and if he presently can’t, and he’s smart enough, he’ll invent some machine to fulfill it.
Advanced technology appropriated to serve our every grotesque, demented whim, it’s a sickness we have, and I think we all have it some extent, humanity is sick.
But this will all become more apparent after civilization collapses due to disease, resource depletion and nuclear warfare, that is if there’s anyone left to apprehend it, and it will happen, it is happening.

Unlike the left, for lack of a better term, or some factions of it, I see such as primarily an ethical or psychological problem, a question of values, philosophy, perspective, metaphysics, rather than an economic one, but it can be addressed from either angle.
It’s also a genetic problem, and some people may have this gene, this gene that causes people to be hypercompetative, and greedy.

I would say survival trumps just about any single psychological need, unless survival is only possible if one deprives themselves of all or almost all psychological needs.
You don’t have to do this thou, it’s not as if we need to deprive ourselves of every psychological need, for the sake of our survival, and for nature, we only have to reign some of them in, some of the time, find a balance.
There’s no balance today, the way I see it, none whatsoever, we are consuming ourselves into oblivion, and it’s only just the beginning.
Society is just going to get more and more sickly, and then it’s going to be taken over by other, more primitive societies, and/or reclaimed by nature.

We also have to consider societies needs too, and not just the needs of any single individual, as I’ve already explained, and also, what is it that’s surviving, what does it mean to be yourself, or human?
We can define it in purely genetic terms, like hey, your body is still there, or yea, you have a torso, but no limbs or head, because we’re keeping you alive on life support, but is that really you?
The more pieces we taken from a thing, the less it, it is, the more it becomes something else.
A man without a brain has become in some very important aspects, inhuman, since human is defined, and ought to be defined, as something having a brain, and so to dispose of such a thing is little different than disposing of a piece of plant matter, or an amorphous blob of cellular tissue.
I mean if we keep a dog heart alive, in a vat, is it still a dog, and does it have value to us?
It isn’t, and no it does not.
At some point, in removing vital parts of ourselves, we lose our humanity or much of it, we can no longer be called human, and the needs of humans, not amorphous/severely mutilated cellular tissue, is what matters.

So yes, needs are what’s important, especially the physical ones, in almost all cases, but we must also ask, the needs of who, or of what?
Some peoples needs are more important than others, some people may undergo such changes as to no longer warrant being called people.
Some people contribute to the needs and harmless desires of society, and some people detract.

Needs have the most value, especially physical but also psychology, but who’s needs, what’s?
I would say people, especially those who can take care of their own needs in a way that helps society take care of its, and isn’t a burden to nature, or burdens nature little, their needs are most important.
A person may produce a lot, and grow very rich, but how much value do the really have, if they’re harming nature, and fulfilling peoples frivolous desires at the expense of their needs?
Such people are more cancerous to society than people in vegetative states, and they and the people who’re addicted to their ‘goods and services’, if they can be called that.

I agree, that’s a good point.
If people are unaware of their real needs, they may be trying to fill that hole with all sorts of other things, which may only temporarily satisfy them, at best, and that’s how addiction can start.
Understanding what our real needs are, like the need to be healthy, to not feel ill all the time, or to have people around you who you care for, can relate to, and they you, may be what you really need, and realizing that, and being able to fulfill that, may help you give up whatever you’re addicted to.
Sometimes we have what we need, or most of it, and we’re just not aware, because we get stuck in this habit of always wanting more, always thinking about what we don’t have, and it’s important to break such harmful habits. Sometimes I think we can just be, and not constantly think about what we don’t have, being anxious for the future, mournful of the past, and just be peaceful and content with living and being in the present.

Intelligence is just one out of many other competences I could have used as an example.

My point is that whenever you remove an organism from its habitat and force it into an environment that is alien to it, its competences become obsolete, unable to be practiced within that new environment, which the organism then experiences as suffering, and yes, as dying.

Intelligence, of any sort, isn’t that necessary for survival. Insects have little to none of it and they are pretty much the masters of survival.

Eusocial organisms, in general, are individually weak, capable of only performing simple, highly specialized, tasks. Their power is collective . . . as a group of highly specialized organisms they are brilliant.

The function of the alpha male, of the king, of any group of termites is nothing but to . . . reproduce. A laughable concept compared to that which applies to humans where by king we mean someone who governs an entire nation whether he reproduces or not.

I suppose, then, that according to your logic, which places survival above everything else, we should strive to be . . . insects?

Magnus Anderson

That answer would depend on who you are asking.
A soldier fighting in a war or a child living in a gang or drug infested neighborhood might have a different life experience than we do.

Are you asking for one’s quality of life or the state of existing?

Like attempting to gather the oceans in a little cup.

Obviously, they are a part of what some consider to be needed in life.
Their removal is what we call “dying to self” - which is a form of death and which letting go prepares us for the Big Death.

Excesses are a compensation for what is felt to be missing. They only die when something good has come to replace them.

I wasn’t trying to say only survival matters, just that there’s a hierarchy of needs, the physical needs being almost always primary, psychological needs secondary and desires tertiary.
All of them are more/less important, just that generally speaking, the former shouldn’t be sacrificed for the latter, nor should we sacrifice all of nature, or much of it, for the sake of our desires, we should repress some of them, many of them, or find ways of satisfying them or diverting them that aren’t as harmful to our health as individuals, as a society, and to life itself.

As for the social insects, I don’t think their way of socializing is any better than ours.
Insects are only as social as they are, because all members of their colony are biological sisters, and brothers.
Human beings in a society aren’t as related to one another, or as specialized, and there’s good and bad in that, as we can still function independently as individuals when need be, and we have the benefit of adding our individuality to the collective, helping it to evolve, rather than stagnate.

Procreation has, pros, and cons, if there’s not enough resources to go around, it can be bad.
The idea is not to have as many offspring as possible, but not to exceed the environmental carrying capacity.
Also, the more offspring, the less you can give them special attention, animals that tend to have lots of offspring, tend not to care for them, and so the vast majority of them die off, sometimes they all die off.

I’m not sure if insects are more successful than mammals, or if any particular species of insect, is more successful than human beings, from a survival standpoint.
You can’t compare insects or say ants as a whole to humans, because that’s comparing an entire class or order to a single species, the correct comparison would be a species of insect, like a particular kind of ant, like a fire ant, to human beings.
Even if there’s trillions of fire ants and only billions of human beings, ants are a lot smaller, in order to determine who’s more successful from a more objective standpoint, I would compare the total weight of fire ants to human beings.
Success is fleeting thou, I wouldn’t be surprised if humans offed themselves sooner than later.

From a survival standpoint governing a whole society isn’t necessarily successful, or from an offspring standpoint, Alexander the great died young without an heir, but then some dictators have harems and hundreds of children, so it depends.
Polygamy has advantages and disadvantages too, the less wives there are to go around, the more civil unrest, and in any case, how many rich and powerful men today have harems?
From both a survival standpoint, and a happiness or health standpoint, it makes little difference, whether you’re a CEO, president/prime minister, or middle class person, even from an influence standpoint, a president isn’t responsible for all that much, and can easily be replaced, in many cases they’re just figureheads or puppets, so much is decided by the thousands of men who’re ‘under’ them, and support them, as well as legal precedents, corporations and so on.

What I"m trying to say really is just that great wealth and power, fame and fortune are totally unnecessary, yet our society worships them, as many others have.
What really matters is that you and those who you’re responsible have their needs, especially physical, but psychological too, met, and you need to be very wealthy to do this, everything else is superfluous, and can sometimes do a lot more harm to us as individuals and as a whole.
Everything has a cost, what can be done without shouldn’t be risked for what can.
I think we’d most of us might be better off if we adopted more ascetic or minimalist values.

There is a hierarchy of needs, yes, but what is not there is a single structure of needs that applies to everyone.

There is a multiplicity of traditions.

The best life, from an individual’s perspective, is that which is lived in accordance with the natural evolution of one’s tradition.

The problem of modern age is the fact that people no longer have any customs.

Every individual and culture is different, and has different needs, but every individual and culture is also the same, and has the same needs, it can be seen either way.
There’s a lot of things we have in common, and there’s some things we don’t.
No system is perfect, but a good one would have few or at least fewer exceptions to its rules.
We need to improvise, but sometimes systems are necessary, because systems take the whole, past, present and future into account, not merely the immediate.
Our traditions had a lot of flaws, but they worked well enough for centuries, now we’ve abandoned them, and replaced them with nothing in some cases, or self help, pop philosophy, psychology/psychiatry and secular right/left politics in others.
The contemporary systems we have are constantly upgrading themselves, and are somewhat atraditional, but I believe there is a foundation to them that never changes, and unfortunately for moderns that foundation has been built upon sand, it’s only a matter of time before the edifice completely collapses.

All needs are means to a desired end, all desired ends are wants. Nobody needs to live, in fact, everyone does “need” to die, as in order for life to exist, life must die. There are no needs, only wants, only desires.

Nihilistically incorrect. Life does not require death, although death obviously requires life.

Satanic lustful propaganda. One could just as easily say, “There are no wants or desires, only motions.”

The most fundamental need, often ignored yet one cannot live without for even a moment: A place to be.
… just ask the homeless.