The Categories of Survival

The one motive with many faces.

 

Firstly, mere biological survival is just one, albeit important, step in survival. It is necessary for one to support the body to allow for ones’ particular perceptions. However, the soul is a much stronger aspect of the self. We can define souls as the sum of our unique personalities and life experiences. It is also important to understand it as the ego. We must always feed the ego, not neccasarly our bodies. Humans mastered biological survival with the gift of agriculture, (immortality would make our survival insignificant, and as much as some people want it, it would undermine the significance of living). With the strength of the mind, humans have started to look for other ways to stress the importance of their own existence.

We are coded by our Worldself to struggle for our own life. However, what is our own life? Everyone endeavours to an individual life. As ignorant as people are to the strong bond they share with the rest of the world, they cannot help but want to influence that world. This is the same case for animals who strive for dominance and supremacy. In fact, there are many similarities between man and the animal that illustrate this point that an individual life needs to increase its significance.

 

We also like to put ourselves on display. I think, essentially we like to matter, and I think surviving is just another way of saying, “Look, I matter, I’m important, I’m exceptional.” This is the case right down to the amoeba, they are a freak of nature that has found a way to replicate itself and pass its uniqueness down through the ages by way of genetics. But that wasn’t enough, adequate survival is not enough, it had to be more, survive larger, it had to challenge itself, and here we are.

 

I will now list all the categories of survival and explain the ones that are not obvious to understand. As you can see, there are many, many different ways of improving the self. Please note that one person is not limited to any one category, and that they will change and adapt to get as many categories as they can, given the situation. There is a lifetime of experiences that will make up the decision that they make, and only that extreme understanding will predict what course of action the individual will take. Changing that behaviour, can be even more difficult.  I suppose I could use Maslow's theories and put a gun to your head, but your surivival wish along with the rest of the world will prevent me from making much use of that. I believe we will one day have the ability to predict the future, but we will need a super computer of incredible storage and processing ability. Furthermore, predicting the future will change the world's course forever to something unfavourable and we should be weary of doing that. Still, I think in the right hands, it could be useful, but then again, power corrupts and can be taken, so maybe not.

 

• Biological

• The Necessities
  • Food
  • Water
  • Air
  • Sleep
  • Strengthening
    • Lifting weights
    • Exercising
    • Leisure sports (kind of)
  • Conservation of energy
    • Reason for laziness
    • This is why we choose to be motivated by our strengths more than our weaknesses. (Although if one area is really lacking, people tend to want to fix that). It also makes qualities like “comfort” important.

 

• The Display of Physical Supremacy
  • Ability
  • Beauty
  • Efficiency and recall of the brain
  • Benchmarking – We need to measure our successes relatively to those around us. If we cannot measure our successes then we cannot determine how well we are doing. Success and improvement, by nature, is relative.

 

• Mastery of the Body
  • Pleasure - This is a big one. Our evolved positive reinforcement chemicals have become one of the most sought after substances in our society today. And why not? It is a powerful feeling that can make other concepts fail in comparison. Life on Earth has always found ‘more’ as necessarily better. This logically follows from the fact that life, to exist, must want more and not less. Happiness and pleasure is a strong feeling, it is more, it is life, it is a sign of a good life. It is also a reference to see how well one is doing.
  • Meditation
  • Pain tolerance

 

• Display of the Supremacy of the Mind
  • Gaming, Betting
  • Any kind of Competition
  • Debating
  • The Struggle through adversity
  •                People who like to go on about how hard done by they are will use it as a tool to validate them and make their successes more credible
  • Benchmarking
• Power
  • Thought
    • Factual Knowledge – a strengthening of the mind, much like the strengthening of the body, it gives people the ability to make better decisions with higher rewards
    • Understanding - the same idea as factual knowledge
  • Influence in action
  •            The act of getting people to do one’s bidding. The way of accomplishing this is not significant, as long as one can do it
  • Arguing
  • Manipulation
  • Mastery
  • Morality enforcement
  • Attention getting
  • Territorial
  • Dominance
  • Access to wealth and resources
  • Benchmarking
  • Societal control
    • Monarchs, political leaders, media barons, and artists all can have this

 

• Immortality
  • Offspring
  • Cultural
    • Trend setting
    • History making
    • Societal Influence/control
      • Religious leaders, artists, political leaders, and people who control the media are incredibly strong in this regard.
    • Teaching
      • Words transform into memories. And through the power of communication, memories can live much, much, longer than a lifetime. Socrates is a teacher. And I know what he says, what he thinks and what he knows. He lives on in me, and he’s a solid 2538 years old.

 

• Soul saving
  • Belief in afterlife
  • Mentorship
    • Parenting, guiding or mentoring an individual from a weakness to strength – mild philanthropy
  • Maintaining youth and vigour
  • Salvation

 

• Prestige
  • Integrity
  • Access to rare resources
  • Famousness
  • Accreditation
  • Validation
  • Absorbing
    • By belonging to prestigious group. This is what I think gives society the power that it has (combined with trendsetters and those with influence and power). When the common man realizes that he does not have the resources, strength, or skill to get prestige on his own, he finds something he likes and values and copies it into his own lives. This gives the chosen few their incredible power. It boggles my mind to think about how just an exchange of two ways of survival makes for such massive control and flow that our societies have today. However, having power is strong evidence for significance. Absortion is the most efficient way to obtain prestige. So it makes sense.

 

• Individuality
  • By breaking from the norm, one can show the strength of their will in resisting all attempts to conform to the rest of society. Individuality gains its importance when there is an increase in competition. In smaller communities, individually isn’t as much of an issue or a fight when compared to larger communities. This is why we see more subcultures in urban environments.
    • Absorbing counter cultures and subcultures
    • Scepticism
      • This is an easy way out and something myself, in particular, am sometimes guilty for. What some people will do is complain about how fake and controlled everyone else is. However, the complainer isn’t doing anything themselves to be more of an individual. Scepticism is necessary to see the true potential, but we must also do something about it. Sitting back and watching the world pass by is not the most logical decision.
    • Fine tuning to become completely different

 

• Philanthropism
  • Altruism is a crock. People give for so many reasons. A lot of it gives people prestige, or perhaps individuality or perhaps it’s a display of knowledge and righteousness, or maybe for immortality (like getting your name on a building or a park bench). However, I cannot claim that this is the case for everyone. Let’s hypothesize that one actually cares about one’s fellow man more than one does oneself. I would say that these individuals just see that survival is important for everyone and they try and help everyone for that reason. They would have to do it whether it gives them happiness and satisfaction or not. Doing it for happiness is only doing it for the body. But if you’re having a bad day and you’re very poor and nobody gives a crap about what you do but you still give, then, s**t, that means true altruism is possible. Any takers?
  • Also, philanthropy is very exhausting. One must have enough resources and success to have enough to give back to other people. I think most people have more than they think.
  • The subcategories of philanthropy:
    • Prestige
    • Individuality
    • Immortality
    • Biological
    • Consciousness
    • Altruism
• Suicide
  • If any one category is just doing miserable and proper human survival is an impossibility, suicide will release the victim from the weak area and raise their significance by being exceptional. The weak area will be destroyed and individuality will be drastically enhanced. A reason because of chemical imbalance does not make alot of sense to me, as far as motive goes. However, I could see the chemical imbalance as an inhibitor that makes the vicitim unable to rationally reason how best to survive. But do not underestimate the power and hunger of the human ego. Acceptance and happiness is only two possible reasons for motive. Suicidal thoughts must see the categores such as pretige and pleasure as hopeless, or non-factors. Furthermore, martyrdom can increase all categories extensively. It’s a blatant disregard of biological survival however, and it’s assuming that things will never change. That is quite an irrational thought. Then again, I never said humans are logical creatures. But we still act based on survival whether we love it or hate it.
  • I realize that last paragraph is controversial and unfair to those who have tried it. But unless someone can give me some deductive logic and causality that proves the motives of that tragic action otherwise, I will stick to it. For although my discussion of this topic may be disrespectful to others, I would die before I changed my mind on this without sound reason. So don't think I say it lightly.

 

• Love
  • Love is not a motive and its not its own type of survival. There are many different kinds of love and many different ways of doing it. Love is just a word that means many different things to many different people. It is complex and varied. Love for your family is a combination of a certain amount of survival types. Love for your friends is another, and love for your country is another. Romantic love, I think, is just a symbiotic relationship where both persons are in need of each other and both love one another. Survival types like prestige and power will constantly be exchanged and transferred and chemistry will make the power of existence increase greatly. Beauty, and the admiration of it, will keep the relationship going through the downtimes.
  • Love also bonds individuals either one way or two ways. It does not follow to claim that love is not important since it is not a motive. The bond is incredibly important. I will go into detail into that some other time.
  • If I must presently say something more about love, then I will say this: I want true love, I seek the ideal, but the close I can get is philanthropy. Maybe the individuals define themselves as not just them but also their partner. This could be a very powerful thing. The problem with that however, is that we just don’t have enough of ourselves to consistently give to another person with nothing in return. So maybe when the partners give to one another unrequitedly, they feed each other the necessary categories of survival and the more the couple gives to itself, the greater the outcome. The motive is survival, but the bond is …. A new thing that is the product of survival, but not survival itself. Survival is why, but love is how.

 

• Perception
  • Doing things like watching television or perceiving a substance is not a motive. It is inaction, it is perception. It is unrelated to survival but what we get for being alive. If we enjoy what we see, then our perception will causally relate to our motive in some way. But we don’t necessarily have to enjoy what we see all the time; we can just perceive it. Like love, it is its own thing, not motive.

A Discussion of Other Theories of Motive

 

Maslow's Hiarchy of Needs

 

Physiological

Safety/Security

Social

Esteem

Self-Actualization

 

Essence

 

              Maslow claims that we need to fufill our basic needs first (starting with physiological) before we fufill needs that our further along the line. He also thinks we can surely motivate another by finding the individual's needs and using those needs as a way of manipulation and reinforcement.

              First, I will match where we agree on. I tie physiogical and safety/security needs into one basic biological one. This biological motive, however, is mush larger than these two needs put together. Maslow understands physical pleasure as a basic physiological need, but how can he possibly think that our needs of sex come before our needs of social, ego, and self-actualization? There is so very much evidence to the contrary, that he must understand that his system does not always work in such a way.

              I will continue by explaining that social needs, I find, can be broken into several other categories where benchmarking and absortion is an issue. I Think there are many different reasons why we socialize, and to sum it all into a reason of itself would be an overgeneralization and not an ultimately broken down concept of motive. Ego and self-actualization, obviously, I agree on, but I think that we can incorporate those things in everything we do. We can use our ego as a means to increase our physiolgocial need (such as beauty), and self-actualization is something we are always doing in so many ideas. What is self-actualization? Why is it a seperate category? We want to fufil our physiological needs, but do we not want to go beyond what is neccasary? I see self-actualization as all emcompassing, it should not be its own category, it just doesn't make any sense.

             Maslow also talks about essence, about spirituality. I am not exactly sure how he describes the thing, nor why he puts it above every need. It's just not a full description of the human being.

             Another thing Maslow completely misses is philanthropy. Are the ideas of equality and justice purely a socail thing? No way, I can think of many examples where that isn't the case. Maslow just hasn't accounted for human morals and altruism.

             

          Aquired needs theory breaks motive down into only three categores: achievment, power, and affiliation. I think its obvious by now where I think this theory is missing.

 

          Equity needs theory simply states that peoples output must equal their perceived inputs and/or rewards.  This is a very simplistic idea, and may work in a few situations where manual labour is incredibly boring and unmeaningful, but people are more complex than that, motive extends beyond such a simple job as that. A simplified theory is good in this situation, but is by no means truth in its entirety. 

 

      Reinforcement theoy "proposes that through consequences of behaviour, people will be motivated to behave in predetermined ways." Behaviour modification through positive and negative reinforcement will get people motivated to what you want them to do. This is true, this is how causality works, but we need to understand in what areas this can be achieved by. We need to know what matters to the individual before we can get them to do anything.   

 

Author's Note

Is this a formal philosophical essay? Hell no. So don't critique it like it is one. I only really want to know my logical errors.

Reviews

[Astrid Hamilton]

There are no logical errors: this is what you believe, and I believe you nailed it when you philosophised
love, in the aspect of love having no motive, except followed by the motive of survival.
But how can one survive without it,
especially if it is true...?
Then give to it, fully, in fulfilling ways before it is gone,
so then did it ever truly exist?

Interesting write.

Very thought-provoking,
and I feel it.
All.

=)

[J. Marc]

This is a very interesting topic, for who has not faced a situation where survival was crucial? Also, one should thank you for such generosity. Now, is suicide really a survival technique? I agree that it can be a sublime way of running one's life to a determined direction, but then it is not anymore survival. The paragraph about love can also be judged as controversial as other people do not see it as a technique to survive. But overall, you should not worry about the logic if you do not have to submit this writing for academic scrutiny!!!!

[Mandy]

I've now read all four chapters. And with each one, they never seized to captivate my utmost interest. I'm definitly posting these in my blog, but of course giving you credit. I'll even post a link to your profile on here. This needs to gain as much exposure as possible. Please, please publish this. And I look forward to reading more.