Our Needs: One Last Look

On 9/2/08 I published a post on 'The Hierachy of Needs' and on 9/4/08 I published a post on 'What We Need and Don't Need'. In a sense, this series grew out of those posts. I began on 5/4/09 with a post entitled 'Looking at Needs'. I listed forty-three different needs and now have published a post about each of them.

In retrospect, I think I may have missed a few. Clothing comes to mind--no matter what you might think about a clothing-optional lifestyle, you can't survive in the winter (at least here in New England) without clothes--unless you never left your house! I probably missed a few others. (Feel free to let me know if you find something I didn't cover.)

I don't think I missed very many needs however, and my point is, this is what we need to focus on. As I mentioned in my last post, there are a lot of so-called 'needs' that the capitalist advertising world wants you to believe that you have (from you 'need' this new deodorant to you 'need' a new car or wardrobe or mcmansion). These are what I was talking about when I wrote about 'What We... Don't Need' last September.

So, the question is: how can we pull ourselves out of a system that creates artificial 'pseudo-needs' and how can we meet, not only our own real needs, but everyone's real needs? This is what I am talking about when I say I am *Offering Some Tools for Creating a World that Works for Everyone *. A world that works for everyone is a world that meets everyone's needs. I hope that my outline of what those needs are will be helpful trying to figure out how to meet them.


Quote of the Day: "What they are all somehow attempting is to break through... the cycles of destruction and despair in order to imagine, remember and create ways of living that correspond to our deepest needs." - Helen Forsey