The Argument for Second-Order Needs
After my stomach is full, my flesh warm, my throat wetted, my lungs full of air and my body well rested and safe, I am still a very needy creature. Even after I reproduce myself, at the moment when biologically all my needs are met—when many other species are satisfied with life—I am still at my core deeply needy and unfulfilled. I am a human being, and these immediate first-order needs are not all that trouble me. They are not the end point of my existence.
I am “so full of future,” past, and imagination. I have a mind and a whole world of thoughts and concepts in which I couch my existence. Merely maintaining my beating heart is insufficient; I have a whole garden of the mind to tend to, or else it—the place where I live—will become overgrown and miserable. I am brushed with eternity, and so am blessed with thinking and cursed with a needy mind. And this mind needs love, connection, meaning, self-realization, a world that makes sense, and more…
There, my life—my human life—can truly begin. With its whole host of second-order needs to be troubled with, fulfilled, and enjoyed. Needs that go beyond the simple subsistence of the body to the creation of a world that is dynamic and interesting; full of psychological and moral complexity.
In the lofty realms of theory and intuition, the importance of second-order needs has never been in doubt. Since the first wispy thoughts asked “what is a good life?” or the first glimpses of another human prompted “what’s next?” we have known there is more to be lived than survival and reproduction. And when we sit back, our first-order needs momentarily overcome by survival strategies, our intuition breathes a question: “why do I still breathe?”
But in broad culture, after centuries of chasing first-order needs, the importance of second-order needs has been discounted. They are not essential, they can be delayed in favor of perfecting and expanding access to first-order needs. Human life can get on without them, though unhappily, and perhaps should do so. What is meaning, love, or respect when there is still work to do between food and mouth? To secure access, secure quality, to elevate the dining experience… in fact why not perfect your subsistence by dining on a boat? Indeed, what is there anyway beyond collecting the most flexible representation of first-order needs? Green… that will buy happiness, surely, if I use it to chase down all the first-order needs I can think of. A mentality that stubbornly thrives off the divorce of labor, its products and their consumption; that convinces, since enough is now an invisible line, that there can never be enough. And that attitude is continually foisted on others down and down a ladder of subsistence. Yet all the while second order needs remain on life support, and people wonder why they are not happy…
And all this compounds itself through a woeful lack of assistance for those seeking out these second-order needs. For first-order needs, a whole trellis of common knowledge and practices lifts and guides us towards food and shelter. We develop our survival strategies across its lattice; a whole framework of friends, family, customs, and expectations. Yet such an infrastructure is missing for second-order needs. Where are the systems of guidance and assistance that begin from the first moments of life? Where is the necessity to not just make a living but to make a life? All this makes the path to fulfilling first-order need navigable and tangible, while second-order needs remain a murky mystery. How much simpler is it to learn to drive, attend a driving school, buy a used car, and slowly upgrade it until you have solved the need of transportation in the most incredible way, than it is to seek out the mysteries of how to connect with other people or find meaning in your life.
Yet it is not necessarily so difficult to pursue our second-order needs. Indigenous and pre-industrial lifestyles honed over hundreds or thousands of years, and now largely wiped out by modernity, had integrated cultural solutions that attempted to fulfill human needs broadly and without deficit. Modern society, with its hyper-focus on first-order needs, lacks these integrated cultural solutions. Instead, it seems convinced that a market system created to fulfill first-order needs can address second-order ones just as readily. A conclusion seemingly founded on ignorance as to the nature of second-order needs: they are not scarce or consumable, and cannot be externally provided. Instead, they are only fulfilled by the individual work of the needer. By personal happenings that cannot be recreated. The interaction of personhood with undefinable variables.
So then what can be attempted to work towards these needs? Are they to remain either a burden or a lack? No. Rather, we need to provide a push, a shove, and a gentle guidance towards habit. To undertake work that builds towards the trellis, that opens the way for people to fulfill their own needs by creating situations that empower them to. Ones that lay out before them a world of possibility that might just change the world in which they live. For second-order needs and first-order ones are not separate. They are both parts of the human experience—yet different enough to make note of—and it is making this experience a finer one that we are concerned with.
