Our innate physical and emotional needs

These needs are not difficult to appreciate since we all share them. As human animals we are born into a material world where we need air to breathe, water, nutritious food and sufficient of the right quality of sleep.[22] These are our paramount physical needs. Without them, we quickly die — as many people do in parts of the world where clean water is scarce and food is in short supply.
We also need the freedom to stimulate our senses and exercise our muscles. In addition, we instinctively seek sufficient and secure shelter where we can grow, reproduce ourselves and bring up our young in safety. Our physical needs are intimately bound up with our emotional needs.

Emotional needs include:
> security — safe territory and an environment which allows us to develop fully
> attention (to give and receive it)
> sense of autonomy and control
> being emotionally connected to others
> access to privacy so we can reflect on, and consolidate, experience
> being valued by the wider community — status friendship, intimacy
> learning competency in skills — so as not to have low self-esteem
> being stretched in what we do and how we think, from which comes our sense that life has meaning and purpose.

If these needs are not met as we grow up, we easily become needy, greedy, angry, anxious and depressed — forms of emotional arousal that, when we are in thrall to them, reduce our humanity and lead to all the miseries and cruelties in the world. When it is more widely recognised that one of the main responsibilities of every type of human group, from the family to the largest institution, is to help ensure that the physical and emotional needs of every child and adult with which it is engaged should be met, life will be more rewarding in every way.

Fortunately nature also programmed us with guidance systems to help us meet our needs.
These are our innate resources and they include:
> The ability to develop complex long-term memory, which enables us to learn and add new knowledge to our innate knowledge.
> The ability to build rapport, empathise and connect with others.
> Imagination, which enables us to focus our attention away from our immediate emotional responses and solve problems more creatively and objectively.
> A curious, conscious, rational mind that can check out emotions, question, analyse and plan (a left brain hemisphere activity).
> The ability to store and develop knowledge — that is, to understand the world through metaphorical pattern matching (an unconscious, right brain hemisphere activity).
> An observing self — the awareness of being aware: that part of us which can step back from our intellect, emotion and conditioning and be more objective (a frontal lobe activity).
> The ability to dream, which discharges unexpressed emotional expectations from the day just gone thus freeing the brain to deal with the next day's emotionally arousing concerns, thus preserving the integrity of our genetic inheritance.

These needs and resources are explored fully elsewhere[23] but, even in this truncated form, it is possible to see how many of them could be used to provide a simple yardstick for gauging the effectiveness of an institution, political policy, company or service: in other words, how well it measures up to the criteria of meeting physical and emotional needs — the human givens. We can check, via this means, whether schools and universities are working in tune with the way nature designed us to learn, and whether institutions dealing with mental and physical illnesses, disabilities, social problems (addiction, poverty, antisocial behaviour, crime), law and policing, as well as organisations responsible for the financial and material wealth of society, are aligned to the human givens. It is all a question of balance and any organisation not working in alignment with our human givens is likely to have gone off the rails and be damaging to society in just the same way as an individual who goes off the rails causes chaos in the local community.

The kind of institutional damage we mean can be seen in almost any work-place. Many people today feel paralysed and prevented from using their initiative, employing their skills to the full and taking responsibility for what they do, with the result that they can only make a minimal contribution to the organisations they work for, as their need to be in control and be stretched is gradually conditioned out of them. (This can start in childhood in those families where children have everything done for them and so are not encouraged to take responsibility for their actions.) Almost anywhere you look the real work is done by only a handful of people, those who manage to retain a degree of control over major elements of their work life, all the rest could be seen as 'hangers on' and should not be classed as workers at all. Due to the fact that status tends erroneously to be equated with power (i.e. management roles, conferring power over others), institutions reward through promotion, and thus literally promote dissatisfaction and incompetence.

The well-known Peter Principle states that employees rise up the ladder to the point where they spend less and less time doing what they can do well, and more and more time doing what they can't do well, after which they progress no more. Thus the useful work is accomplished only by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.[24] The others, meanwhile, may become more and more stressed, as they fail to achieve what is expected of them. This is particularly a problem in institutions where responsibility for tasks is centralised.

The consequence is that fewer and fewer people develop the higher human qualities society needs. That is why so many government projects and private businesses fail.[25] And those ventures that do prosper do so because of the efforts of a handful of people who carry the majority.[26]

It seems that, when fear or hunger is removed as a motivation to excel, many people take the easy option and do as little as possible. So there is a shortage of people of quality, even at the highest levels. Moreover, this system of incompetence protects itself by making it legally difficult to hire and fire. (If employers try to insist that underperforming, lazy people do the job properly, they can now be accused of work-place harassment at great expense to themselves, but little inconvenience to the employees.[27])

Because excessive rules and regulations imposed by successive governments have effectively leached away individuals' sense of personal responsibility for good behaviour, more and more of us feel it is OK to cheat the system. Many overstretched GPs, for example, do, for a variety of reasons, collude in fraud by writing sick notes for 'patients' who pressure them, even when they know the person is not sick.[28] Growth in irresponsibility and moral cowardice can be seen in all professions, as can the disastrous consequences.[29] Yet it is the very design of the institutions we all subscribe to that makes such consequences inevitable.[30]

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