11:17am June 9, 2014

read the fault in our stars

I really liked this bit:

So there is this thing called Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Basically, this guy Abraham Maslow became famous for his theory that certain needs must be met before you can even have other kinds of needs. It looks like this:

Once your needs for food and water are fulfilled, you move up to the next set of needs, security, and then the next and the next, but the important thing is that, according to Maslow, until your physiological needs are satisfied, you can’t even worry about security or social needs, let alone “self-actualization,” which is when you start to, like, make art and think about morality and quantum physics and stuff.

According to Maslow, I was stuck on the second level of the pyramid, unable to feel secure in my health and therefore unable to reach for love and respect and art and whatever else, which is, of course, utter horseshit: The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.

Maslow’s pyramid seemed to imply that I was less human than other people, and most people seemed to agree with him. But not Augustus. I always thought he could love me because he’d once been sick. Only now did it occur to me that maybe he still was.

I actually came to that same conclusion about Maslow when I was busy dealing with survival stuff in 1999 and I actually became very pissed at Maslow that year. Because I was also growing spiritually in a lot of ways, and according to Maslow that’s impossible because you supposedly can’t deal with “higher” urges until you’re eating regularly and stuff. When actually, in reality, dealing with survival-level problems can push you towards spiritual growth that you can’t always do when you’re comfortable and everything’s taken care of. So I became very pissed off at Maslow and was very gratified at that passage in that book.

It’s one of many areas where I really felt like he got “little things” right. And that’s why I like this book regardless of what anyone else has to say about it. I’m not a book critic, I’m just a reader. And I feel out of place in a lot of online discussions because even casual fans act like book critics and critique on the same level as book critics and I can’t and won’t ever be able to do that. And it pisses me off that you can’t just like something, or dislike it for that matter, around here.

Earlier today I actually replied to someone who asked if they were still allowed to like TFIOS or something like that… that really pissed me off, that things could come to the point where people think they’re not allowed to like something.

Notes: