Hello good reader!
So, this is the awkward post where I explain why I haven’t posted anything for the past three weeks, because let’s face it, that’s pretty bad. As I mentioned before I went on a two week trip overseas to the Philippines to help out a school there. In the preparation for the trip I had very little time to poast anything and on the trip internet was a rare commodity that was used solely for sending brief messages to friends back home. So yeah, oops. But hey, I’m back, let the good posts role, I thought I’d get things moving with some good ol’ Maslow.
In the Philippines I was constantly astonished by one thing, which was the Filipino’s generousity. Now I can’t say realisticly that all Filipino’s are generous, but in the community I was in it was definitely the norm. This might not sound like a real big deal at first, but it was when I got to know some of the people there better that I started to be suprised, and the little grey cells got working. There was a woman who taught at the school that by all standards seemed like your standard, middle-class teacher. She was giving of her time, her (presumably significant) resources, and didn’t ask for anything in return. Anyway, the trip went on and I had the opportunity to visit this woman’s house, what I saw when I got there amazed me. The house was little more than sticks with boards and tarp, and it was a struggle to pay for, and provided very little shelter from the weather. Now this is a common sight where I was, so it wasn’t so much the house that suprised me, but the disparity between the woman’s circumstances and how much she gave what she had to other people. This got me thinking about Maslow’s hierachy of needs which, in case you don’t know, is a needs theory that explains what people need to survive and in what order they will seek certain needs, based on their current situation (e.g. Someone without a home won’t be looking to win the nobel prize, they’ll want a house first, then friends, then a job, etc.). So based of my understanding of Maslow’s hierachy, this woman shouldn’t have been doing what she was. She wasn’t fully meeting her safety and psychological needs, but had jumped ahead to her belonging needs, and based on several things she spoke of, had plans set in motion to start achieving her esteem needs.
An understandable response to this is “So what? It’s societal norm to have a shonky house in the Philippines, she had what she thought was normal, and she was progressing to the next stage”, but that isn’t how it works, according to Maslow at least, you need to satisfactorily have a need fulfilled before you even consider the next, and this woman was doing the complete opposite. Even in the generous Philippines, this was seen by the community as odd. Now call it coincidence, but this woman had a different religion than those who lived around her. The Philippines is a predominantly Catholic country, and other relgions are minorities. This woman wasn’t Catholic, she identified as a “born again Christian”, as did a few others in the community, all of which were not only generous, but even went out of their own way to help people better off than them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not dogging Catholics, but it made me think – What if there is something to following a more ‘faith’ based religion, instead of following a set of rules? I’m not saying this as a set rule, that ‘faith’ religions make someone a better person, and vice versa. But if everything is truly meaningless, and there is no God, is it really that bad to believe in something that makes you a better person, even if it’s wrong? Does giving subjective meaning to the meangingless make it truly meangingful?
There is no doubt that there are errors to what I’ve just said, but I think it’s worth thinking about anyway. More posts are coming soon, I had a decent amount of time to think about things to post during my time away, and the next in the series of the Hobbit is coming along nicely.
Until next time.
That is All.
The Mind Cellar 