To Orwell Today,
re: ORWELL ON FREUD'S COUCH

Hi Jackie,

Interesting links with Freud. Made me think of the link with Abraham Maslow and his Pyramid of Hierachial Needs of the individual. Maslow used the big brother symbol of the pyramid to present his theory of the hierachial needs of the individual and the seven layers of human needs eg Food, Shelter, Love etc. This made me wonder if Maslow was himself a member of freemasonry. What do you think?

All the very best,
Raymond Wills

Greetings Raymond,

I don't think Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs being shaped like a pyramid implicates him in membership in "the brotherhood" supporting "Big Brother" (a dedicated sect doing evil).

A triangle is a geometric shape that can be applied to explain many features of social and political aspects of society - as well as psychological, as in the case of Maslow explaining his theory of human needs.

Maslow's basic premise is that people's basic needs have to be met first, before they can help others meet their needs.

He used a pyramid to show that the vast majority of people are engaged in satisfying the basic needs of life - ie food, water, shelter, employment, family and friends.

Through achieving those needs - which take up the bottom half of the pyramid - people acquire self-esteem and confidence and are in a comfort zone, wherefrom some climb the pyramid higher and help others. This is the self-actualization stage - the top of the pyramid - where a person reaches the highest human potential - that of helping make the world a better place through helping other human beings.

If, at any time, a person at the top of the pyramid loses his basic needs - ie employment, family, shelter, food, water, they will no longer be in a position to help other people because they will be involved in self-survival.

Orwell understood the Maslow concept completely, and describes it in "1984":

"...From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. The machine, when used for that purpose, did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

"The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare. The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. If technical progress were allowed to flourish in directions other than war and surveillance, there would be no more need for human drudgery and human inequality would disappear.

"The needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is a deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another...

"...An all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction - indeed, in some sense was the destruction - of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance....

"Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.

"From the point of view of our present rulers, therefore, the only genuine dangers are the splitting-off of a new group of able, under-employed, power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and scepticism in their own ranks. The problem, that is to say; is educational. It is a problem of continuously moulding the consciousness both of the directing group and the larger executive group that lies immediately below it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be influenced in a negative way...."

All the best,
Jackie Jura

11.Ministry of Plenty (Starvation) and 5.Pyramidal New World Order and 8.Classes of People and 9.Keeping Masses Down