"Because" is our problem, and Maslow's hierarchy is too simple.

“It’s complicated” is the truest assessment of almost every human situation. The words “because” and “the”, as in “cause and effect”, and “elegant”, “simple”, and “obvious” are some of the words that produce our greatest problems and misunderstandings. “Reason” is a singular word; causes isn’t much better, it still implies a simple set of answers which are cause and effect based. 'This leads to that', in a direct, linear way is a massive problem for humans in understanding and living peacefully with each other.

We are the only Beings that enquire after being and this causes us no end of difficulty. It has led us to come up with many contortions of language, logic, and reason. We have decided, in the last few centuries, to apply Cartesian natural scientific thinking where previously we had relied upon the supernatural. We have used our experience and empirical evidence to put in train a system of scientific claim, acceptance, and refutation whereby we must have things as stripped down and uncomplicated as possible to avoid such refutation. It doesn’t work when it comes to humans.

The common overuse of cause and effect thinking, the misunderstanding of Occam's Razor, puts us in the realm of misquoted and misunderstood simplifications. Only when we have stripped away as many layers of confounding explanation as possible can we begin to apply minimal analysis. Yet, we do it all the time. We have been fooled into overlaying natural science everywhere. We must have a diagnosis. There must be “an” answer. Everything must be reduced to a label.

We are all capable of so much more, and I believe we must do so much better to avoid this century being our last.

We want “an” explanation. We want to know why, what is “the” reason? We want to hear “this is because of that”, and then we know that if that one thing is altered, “then” this will be fixed, or broken, something simplistic anyway. We are told that we should name a thing that ails us. This is helpful, “because” then we know exactly what “it” is. Even if we don’t want to do this, it is demanded of us so others can place labels on us and use them to predict our thoughts and behaviour.

I noticed this in recent reports of the “wrong” psychological diagnosis which some people are claiming has been placed upon them by medical professionals. Medical professionals like GPs who can and do prescribe drugs. They are trained in a positivist way, one in which the cause of something is identified by deduction, and an agreed solution is applied to “the” problem. This works swimmingly with physical illness (they are called Physicians after all), but not so well with mental illness. In mood, emotional, psychological, thinking, feeling etc. disturbances, there can be chemical imbalances which one can shovel drugs at, but it’s complicated.

It's complicated due to the way mental illness is “diagnosed” by psychology. Diagnosis in clinical psychology is most often the result of a certain level of points scored on agreed tests. These tests are heavily reliant on self-report, but also on observation and records of interactions. They measure clusters of symptoms. Here’s the problem though, the symptoms show themselves in several different diagnoses, so the trick is to be able to say which one is more likely. You can’t take a blood sample and count things.

Our lived experiences of phenomena are massively complex. We ourselves, our own Being and our moods and understanding of the world are in constant flux, anchored by chords which are taught or slack depending on myriad criteria. How we feel is so far from fixed and dependent on simple cause and effect as it’s, well, humanly possible to be. Yet we will say na?ve things like “what’s that rich person got to complain about”, for example.

This brings me to Maslow, and his so-called hierarchy of needs. It’s very old and very silly. It was published in 1943!

It is not silly because it’s old, that would be an over-simplification and frankly, a silly thing to suggest. It is silly because it places us in a psychological and emotional hierarchy which is a huge over-simplification. It plays into our propensity to want “because” (be cause – the "cause", singular, "be" this, singular) answers to “why” questions. It is not the case that we are able to ‘tick off’ our achievement of each level and then move on to the next as this hierarchy suggests. Nor that such attainment moves us toward the pinnacles of self-actualization and transcendence. My living standards are not directly correlated to my progress up this pyramid, and neither is this the case for anyone else. Nor is it the case that there can be an absolute measure of any of them such that it’s possible to mark them with a ‘got that, what’s next then?’.

I am comfortably well off and would be regarded as an intellectual, yet my emotional state and psychological well-being are variable, to say the least. The reasons are complex and also variable. It is certainly not possible to say that because I am relatively wealthy, I should be happy, content, fulfilled and certainly not any closer to self-actualization and transcendence because I have some more basic animalistic needs covered!

The Existentiell understandings of ourselves as labelled things are quite different to our existential ability to understand at all. Our Being shows itself, of itself. It is not shown by comparison to things which are not us. This is a fundamental problem with the acceptance Cartesian linearity and objective/ subjective duality. When we seek to understand ourselves and others we must make our own interpretation and this is a long way from objective “because” statements. This paragraph contains part of the reason why I think clinical psychology has lost its way. Comparison to “normal”, to conventional, is problematic for so many complex reasons.

The point of this edition of the Enough newsletter is to provoke the idea that where one hears absolute statements being made, or absolute explanations being demanded, we should pause. It’s complicated is likely to be a more accurate answer. If we can actively accept and live with “it’s complicated” and still explore a subject without the need to come down on a particular side of a simple equation, might we become more tolerant, and more peaceful?