MALDEVELOPMENT & Metacrisis (Polycrisis): The Major Problems of Humanity

“It is no measure of?health?to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick?society."

―Jiddu Krishnamurti

"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?"

―Ursula K. Le Guin

“It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.”

―From the movie “Crash”, 2004

Rereading one of Carlos Mallmann's texts written more than 40 years ago, I came across a diagnosis of what today we could call "metacrisis". Sometimes, it is not necessary to reinvent the wheel; just look back and see what our ancestors said. I have heard this many times in the West when it is said that the ancient Greeks, through their works, had already said everything about the human condition. One only had to look at which of them.

Almost a hundred years earlier, the philosopher Ortega y Gasset could have given us a first good diagnosis of the metacrisis with one of his most outstanding and paradoxical quotes:

“We do not know what is happening to us, and this is precisely what is happening to us, not to know what is happening to us."

Mallmann, who left his career as a nuclear physicist, probably looked for the ‘core’ or “nucleus” of all this that happens to us humans in all his later work. As a follower of Erich Fromm, two of his favourite metaphors ‘Health’ and ‘Love’ are in his diagnosis and healing. His definition of need is linked to health and reads as follows:

"Need: the generic requirement that all human beings have in order not to be ill, by the mere fact of being members of the human species."

On the other hand, we have the World Health Organization's (WHO) definition of Health:

‘Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

It is at this point that the individual and the collective merge. As Krishnamurti and Ursula K. Le Guin rightly pointed out, illness is not only individual but collective. The culture that surrounds societies is as much a part of their health as their illness.

An excellent metaphor to understand this can be found in aquariums. Any aquarium expert, among other indications, will tell you the importance of water oxygenation and why it must be changed regularly. If the water is not changed, the fish will start to get sick. At that point, the issue is not only to cure the fish that is sick but also to change the water. The three ‘Vital’ needs (Maintenance, Protection & Love) are at the basis of any good aquarium keeper.

Let's start with the diagnosis.

In the ’70s, as I wrote in this article, Mallmann was looking for a theory of Wellbeing. He said it would take between 50 and 100 years to find it but he did not wait and laid the foundations of that theory with a look at ‘human needs’. For him, needs were few and "wants" and "satisfiers" could be infinite (perhaps as much as the imagination can create). He arrived at that set of nine needs as the minimum set of needs different from each other, covering the spectrum of human activities.

From a metaphorical point of view with nuclear physics, one could say that needs were the nucleus of the "human" atom. And... what orbits around the 'nucleus', one might now ask? It is here that Mallmann linked it with the satisfiers, which for him were not few but very many, perhaps as many as human creativity can reach and as diverse as the different cultures that have existed. It is here that, taking that metaphor of the atom again, I see that these needs are surrounded by a ‘probabilistic’ cloud of satisfiers (electrons). The paradox, as in quantum physics, is that when one intervenes in satisfying one’s needs, one unintentionally alters the whole ecosystem of needs. Hence the conscious or unconscious satisfaction of our needs should be as balanced as possible. When we go to the other extreme, a great unbalanced choice is when a Spanish saying comes to mind, "You are killing flies with cannons." In terms (needs/satisfiers) it would be that to satisfy a single human need, you are damaging 1, 2 or more needs of that ecosystem that you will then have to urgently heal.

In a 1983 paper entitled ‘Maldevelopment, human-centered social development, quantity and quality of life and indicator building’, Mallmann has a section in which he talks about the "Human Poverties". He had already spoken about it in one of the chapters of the report of the Club Of Rome ‘No limits to learning’ (1979):

"...the report should stress learning for the eradication of poverty – not only material poverty but also the poverties of understanding, of security and protection, of love and compassion, of autonomy and anticipation, of meaning and spiritual justice, and of equity."

In this paper, he comments that "the major problems of humanity’ are those which are responsible for the lowest levels of quality of life throughout the largest fraction of the world population". Mallmann, when he spoke of quality of life, said that this construct had two other complementary components; one more objective, the satisfaction of needs properly, and the other more subjective, the subject's evaluation of their degree of satisfaction.

It is then that he concludes:

"Joining together the relation we assume between the great problems of humanity and quality of life levels and the association between these levels and the satisfaction of human needs, it follows that the great problems of humanity are those which correspond to the lowest levels of satisfaction of human needs throughout the largest fraction of the world population."

According to this perspective, the needs whose levels of satisfaction are lowest are the following ones: EXISTENCE, SECURITY, RELATING (Love + Participation), UNDERSTANDING and MEANING. He calls them ‘poverties’ because he extends this term to cover not only scarcity of physical satisfiers but scarcity of psychological satisfiers too.

I will briefly comment with a view from 2024 to what Mallmann commented in 1983.

1) POVERTY OF EXISTENCE

Just as I write this article, the G20 summit is taking place in Rio de Janeiro, and the president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, is urging the members of the G20 to put an end to hunger, one of the most significant problems of human existence. Mallmann commented above that this issue was very well studied, but it was possibly poorly implemented because even today, millions of people are still going hungry while others are living in wastefulness.

2) POVERTY OF SECURITY

Again from a temporal perspective, I have no words to describe the horror and suffering of the populations of Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, Ethiopia, the Sahel, Haiti....

3) POVERTY OF RELATING

Poverty of relating is due to two other poverties, mainly poverty of love and poverty of participation.

3A) POVERTY OF LOVE

In this poverty of love, which is also the other great metaphor used by Mallmann, I cannot leave aside the great polarisations of today from these three perspectives that do not manage to embrace each other.

<> Me vs. Me

<> My group vs. other groups

<> I/we vs. Nature

3B) POVERTY OF PARTICIPATION

I have analysed this poverty in this article on the paradoxes of democracy and participation. My conclusion is that we live in pseudo-democracies and that what exists is not participation but pseudo-participation.

4) POVERTY OF UNDERSTANDING

This article goes directly to this poverty of understanding, and it is from some of my strengths (love of learning, curiosity, critical thinking, perspective, open-mindedness) that I disseminate content to try to see ‘reality’ and ‘the big picture’.

5) POVERTY OF MEANING

Mallmann said that this poverty had not been sufficiently studied, and that is probably true. Today, in 2024, I can't help but remember John Vervaeke's outreach work with his podcast and YouTube videos Chanel,?‘Awakening from the meaning crisis’.

Finally, and as any critical analysis needs its counterpart, the constructive part, let's bring those possible pathways to adapt to this metacrisis. In a way, I feel like an heir to Mallmann's spirit, and my focus is on education and ethics, which are the "H?O" formula of the culture that surrounds us. Many of my writings include the motto that stems from Mallmann's three last needs and that is the conscious hand, ‘Creating meaningful synergies’.

In the article "Everything everywhere all at once" the last part of my trilogy “Next 50 Years (Back to the Basics): Science with Conscience for a Planetary Wellbeing Society", you will find constructive projects and pathways in the spirit of those four hands that are the embodiment of those nine needs proposed by Mallmann more than 50 years ago.