Now I will put on the board something with which former students
are familiar. I always call it the levels of culture, the aspects
of a society: military, political, economic, social, emotional,
religious, and intellectual. Those are your basic human needs.
The interesting thing about them is that they are arranged in
evolutionary sequence. Millions of years ago, even before men
became human, they had a need for defence of the group, because it
is perfectly obvious that men cannot live outside of groups.
They can satisfy their needs only by cooperating within a group.
But I'll go further than that, and return to it again in a moment:
Men will not become men unless they grow up in communities. We will
come back to that because it is the basis of my lecture
tonight.
If you have a group, it must be defended against outsiders;
that's military. Before men came out of the trees they had that
need. If your needs are to be satisfied within some kind of group,
you must have ways of settling disputes and arguments, and
reconciling individual problems within the group; that's political.
You must have organizational patterns for satisfying material
needs, food, clothing, shelter: that's economic.
Then came two which have been largely been destroyed or
frustrated in the last thousand years of Western Civilization.
Men have social
needs. They have a need for other people;
they have a need to love and be loved. They have a need to be
noticed. Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy because no one had
ever noticed him and he was determined that, from now on, someone
would know he existed. In fact, most of these "motiveless"
assassinations are of this type.
Someone went up to the top of the University of Texas tower and
shot something like seventeen people before they caught him. That
was because no one had ever noticed him. People need other people.
That's the social need. The basis of social relationships is
reciprocity: if you cooperate with others, others will cooperate
with you.
The next is emotional need. Men must have emotional experiences.
This is obtained in two ways that I can see: moment to moment
relationships with other people--moment to moment-- and moment to
moment relationships with nature. Our society has so cluttered up
our lives with artefacts-- TV sets or automobiles or whatever-- and
organizational structures that moment to moment with nature are
almost impossible. Most people don't even know what the
weather outside is like. Someone said recently that until September
we had a great drought here in Washington, and four or five people
standing there said, "That's ridiculous." We had a shortage of
about eight inches of rain. Because they're in buildings, it
doesn't matter to them whether it's raining or not.
The next is the religious. It became fashionable in Western
Civilization, particularly in the last hundred years, to be
scornful of religion. But it is a fact that human beings have
religious needs. They have a need for a feeling of certitude in
their minds about things they cannot control and they do not fully
understand, and with humility, they will admit they do not
understand them. When you destroy people's religious expression,
they will establish secularised religions like Marxism.
Now, on the intellectual level: people have intellectual
needs. I used to tell students that Marilyn Monroe had
profound intellectual needs. And when no one would treat her as an
intellect or even as a potential intellect, for obvious reasons,
she was starved for intellectual experience. That's why she married
a man like Arthur Miller: she thought he was an intellectual.
All right, those are human needs. Power is the ability to
satisfy those needs. And someone who says that power is organised
force, or that power is the outcome of an election, or that power
is the ability to cut off our oil supply, has a completely
inadequate way of looking at it. My experience and study of the
destruction of civilizations and the collapse of great empires has
convinced me that empires and civilizations do not collapse because
of deficiencies on the military or the political levels. The Roman
army never met an army that was better than it was. But the Roman
army could not be sustained when all these things had collapsed and
no one cared. No one wanted to serve, no one wanted to pay taxes,
no one cared.
The other part of this will require you to put these things
together to some extent. Persons, personalities if you wish, can be
made only in communities.
A community is made up of intimate relationships among diverse
types of individuals--a kinship group, a local group, a
neighbourhood, a village, a large family. Without communities, no
infant will be sufficiently socialized.
He may grow up to be forty years old, he may have made an
extremely good living, he may have engendered half a dozen
children, but he is still an infant unless he has been properly
socialized and that occurs in the first four or five years of life.
In our society today, we have attempted to throw the whole burden
of socializing out population upon the school system, to which the
individual arrives only at the age of four or five. A few years ago
they had big programs to take children to school for a few hours at
age two and three and four, but that will not socialize them.
The first two years are important. The way a child is treated in
the first two days is of vital importance. He has to be loved,
above all he has to be talked to. A state of individuals, such
as we have now reached in Western Civilization, will not create
persons, and the atomized individuals who make it up will be
motivated by desires which do not necessarily reflect needs.
Instead of needing other people they need a shot of heroin; instead
of some kind of religious conviction, they
have to be with the winning team...
...In the final aspect of this process, controls on behaviour
shift from the intermediate levels of human experience--social,
emotional and religious--to the lower, military and political, or
to the upper, ideological. They become the externalized controls of
a mature society: weapons, bureaucracies, material rewards, or
ideology. Customary conformity is replaced by conscious
decision-making, and this usually implies a shift from your own
conformity to someone else's decision. In its final stages, the
civilization becomes a dualism of almost totalitarian imperial
power and an amorphous mass culture of atomized
individuals...
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