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Basic Human Needs

Hans-Florian Hoyer investigates

• What are the basic human needs which are independent?
• What are the things that depend on these basics?
• How are those dependent things interdependent amongst each other?

Starting from life as the independend basic

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.
We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)

1. Every human being has been given his or her life by two people who have also received it as a gift.
   • Independent basic. (Metaphysics: Where does “life” come from? From whom does the gift begin?)
2. The means to sustain life are provided by the sun and the earth as a gift for all living beings. (Metaphysics: What for? Purpose?)
3. Dependend from these gifts: All living beings must be active in order to sustain their lives. Needs emerging from the living body demand this. Unpleasant consequences of inactivity underscore this.
   • Searching for and consuming food to still the needs. The first mode of economy is ecology: Know what, where, when and how to collect the gifts.
   • Protection and escape from danger
   • (Metaphysics: Universal motive: Paradise, land of milk and honey, garden of the gods/Dilmun, Golden Age, Satya Yuga, => need for action, in the sweat of the brow)
4. After entering earthly existence, the abilities to sustain life are differently developed in living beings. Nest-stools, nest-fledglings. Man has something of both.
   • With regard to the senses and the nervous system, the human being already functions in the mother's womb.
   • With regard to the lungs and the blood circulation, independent functioning begins immediately after birth (cutting the umbilical cord). From the first to the last breath, the human being needs air, which is processed by plants and distributed by physics (weather).
   • With regard to mobility when seeking food, he can suck, swallow and excrete. He can cry, when hungry. A long period of care and learning is necessary before independence can be achieved.
5. Dependend on the physical nature and design of Humans can only exist in community with other humans. Interdependence of dependent beings.
   • Body: The emergence of needs has a time-patterns and tolerance levels of delays in stilling
   • Soul: Needs arise in situations, Relations with others
   • Spirit: The need to connect to one's entelechia emerges in consciousness as the questions:
     • Who am I?
     • What does everything which I am not mean to me?
     • Does my existence have a meaning for the Non-I?
   • The answers can grow into something, one could call: Antroposohia translated as: the wisdom of how my humanity is connected to everything else. Immanuel Kant expressed it in a fragment from the pre-critical period this way:
     • Die größte Angelegenheit des Menschen ist, zu wissen, wie er seine Stelle in der Schöpfung gehörig erfülle, und recht verstehe, was man sein muß, um ein Mensch zu sein.
     • The greatest concern of man is to know how to properly fulfil his place in creation, and to rightly understand what one must be in order to be a man.

Interdependence

To understand complex systems and their dynamics, “contingency” and “emergence” are two scientific-theoretical terms that refer to the unpredictability and novelty of processes or phenomena.

Contingency describes the property of events of not being necessary, but possible. Something is contingent if it is the way it is, but could also be different. Alternatives are conceivable, but do not have to be realized. There is leeway and contingency but no compelling determination. Contingency is closely linked to the openness of the future and processes.

Emergence refers to the appearance of new properties or phenomena in a typically complex system. (e.g. life, consciousness, social systems). The properties cannot be fully explained by the properties of the individual parts. The resulting phenomena are often unpredictable.

Contingency indicates that the future is not completely predictable, as alternatives are possible. This is also the case with emergent phenomena: they often arise unpredictably as they cannot be derived directly from the components. Social structures could also be different; they have grown historically and are changeable.

Something new emerges from the actions of individual people, such as culture or economic systems, which are more than the sum of individual actions.

Contingency and emergence are context-dependent. Human action creates new contexts. In this interdependence, there are permanent factors that go back to the same basics.

These enduring factors must be described without the widespread concepts of contemporary economics. They existed long before the invention of money and writing. In communities that still exist, anthropology has examples of how the task of meeting the pattern of the occurrence of needs that all have with the provision of means to satisfy them is solved. The presence of gifts in nature also has a regionally different pattern that has to be synchronized with this.

As long as people lived under the same "roof" (cave, fenced huts, community buildings) the low level common needs were stilled by ecology and skills. Both abundance and want were borne together.

These social interactions can be distinguished from mutual aid Kropotkin but also from “jealousy” over food:

• contribute to and share in a common
• share, give, lend and exchange property
• steal and rob the property of others

Besides Maslow, who is well known, there also is Max-Neef with his matrix of needs, satisfiers and fake satifiers.

Since economy is about stilling needs in the end, Gossen, Maslov and Neef are important writers. Neef calls himself a "barefoot economist".

Jevon on Hermann Heinrich Gossen: "We now come to a truly remarkable discovery in the history of this branch of literature. Some years since my friend Professor Adamson had noticed in one of Kautz’ works on Political Economy a brief reference to a book said to contain a theory of pleasure and pain, written by a German author named Hermann Heinrich Gossen.

Although he had advertised for it, Professor Adamson was unable to obtain a sight of this book until August 1878, when he fortunately discovered it in a German bookseller’s catalogue, and succeeded in purchasing it.

Gossen evidently held the highest possible opinion of the importance of his own theory, for he commences by claiming honours in economic science equal to those of Copernicus in astronomy. He then at once insists that mathematical treatment, being the only sound one, must be applied throughout ; but, out of consideration for the reader, the higher analysis will be explicitly introduced only when it is requisite to determine maxima and minima. The treatise then opens with the consideration of Economics as the theory of pleasure and pain, that is as the theory of the procedure by which the individual and the aggregate of individuals constituting society, may realise the maximum of pleasure with the minimum of painful effort. The natural law of pleasure is then clearly stated, somewhat as follows:—Increase of the same hind of consumption yields pleasure continuously diminishing up to the point of satiety. This law he illustrates geometrically, and then proceeds to investigate the conditions under which the total pleasure from one or more objects may be raised to a maximum.

Andrius: I'm adding my thoughts about your investigation.

You are asking and distinguishing what are the various basic things that humans need.

One way you distinguish that is by asking what a human needs that they can't delegate to others. For example, we need to breathe and others can't breathe on our behalf. This doesn't change no matter who sophisticated our society or technology. (This question of delegation is one method of investigating.)

So this shows that we have to live our own lives.

Everywhere this leads to the same arrangement of living together as individuals.

Money replaced many of these social gestures by replacing them with buying and selling.

Twin token is a proposed solution, a model of clearing, of making regional money, by having not only the coin but also the debit part within the currency, a kind of double entry bookkeeping. This is money creation from the grass roots. Direct democracy instead of representative democracy.

Andrius Kulikauskas, David Ellison-Bey. An Economy for Giving Everything Away.