Life-Cake.

This week's writing assignment: "Going Without".

 Cakes, not pyramids, were more Maslow's thing.

             Lacking the basics – air, water, food, shelter, clothing, – is alarmingly dangerous and will permanently change you.  Maslow puts our physiological needs at the base of his hierarchical five-layer life-cake for good reason: you won’t go without them  for long, that’s for damn sure – either you’ll die or you’ll kill, but one way or another you’ll find relief.   

            The second-tier of Maslow’s cake is safety.   Once the things that can snuff you are handled, those medium-range threats come into focus. A good government can hold off an angry uprising by addressing just these two levels of need for its populace; conversely – as Nicholas II and Chiang Kai-shek found out the hard way - allowing 30 million people to be starved or butchered by roving gangs will cause a major shift in political favor.  Levels 1 and 2 are where we’ll sink if the Zombie Apocalypse arrives or a particularly energetic sun-produced EMP shuts down the global grid.  “These things,” we muse - as we use a sharpened lawn-mower blade to carve a steak from our dead neighbor’s haunch – “we simply won’t tolerate going without.”

            Tier three, though… - the need for love and acceptance – that can feel like a disposable luxury.  We can skulk around the edges of life without that.  To open ourselves to love and acceptance feels like taking a sledgehammer to the safety of tier two, which we’ve already established we can’t do without;  better to just settle for a Little Debbie than a wedding cake, am I right?

            Esteem, the fourth tier theorized by Maslow, is obviously frivolous, I mean, the shoppers at Wal-Mart alone prove that!  Interestingly, those of us without esteem for ourselves seem to have an abundance to spray all over those we admire, those preening go-getters who strut and crow and drive glossy German cars.  How I hate them - and want to be them!  I imagine sometimes what it must be like to have healthy self-esteem, to place the fourth frosted layer on my Maslow cake – it’s exciting to pretend!   In the end, it’s too much of a stretch; I can never quite get there. 

            If you’re one of the lucky few who’ve managed to carefully craft your life-cake like a boss, your final, crowning layer is self-actualization (snooty, smiling, pretentious, self-absorbed bastards – what does that even mean!!!! ).   I’m fairly certain most of humanity is going without this, and the ones who say they’ve achieved it are just desperately trying to bake tier three.

            Marie Antoinette wasn’t popular with her proletariat because she, wrapped in the gauzy fog of an imagined five full layers, projected her towering fantasy cake onto them, and gaily told them to eat it.  They, tired of living on mud-pies and smoke, turned their baleful glares toward her plump, rosy neck.  It’s alarmingly dangerous, you see, to go without.