acteristics. Self-esteem taken too far veers into narcissism, and you
really don’t want to mess with vulnerable narcissism, a precarious
situation indeed.
GROWTH NEEDS
Maslow’s overarching focus was on people who reached self-actualization;
traditionally “successful” people who were also “loved,
adored and admired.” He compiled survey responses describing
people who had reached this level, building the Good Human Being
(GHB) notebook. Maslow said: “I think of the self-actualizing
man not as an ordinary man with something added, but rather
as the ordinary man with nothing taken away.” Page 89 has a list
of characteristics of self-actualizers: truth-seeking, acceptance,
purpose, authenticity, freshness of appreciation, peak experiences,
humanitarianism, good moral intuition, creative spirit and equanimity.
For the first need on the sail, Exploration, stress-tolerance
translates to improvement in all dimensions of well-being. The
five sub-needs of exploration are Social Exploration, Adventure
Seeking, Post-traumatic Growth, Openness to Experience, and
Intellect. Adaptive social exploration involves curiosity about how
other people operate, rather than a need to fill a void. Healthy adventure
seeking looks for novel experiences, but not necessarily
intense ones; thrill-seeking isn’t always healthy. The section on
post-traumatic growth (PTG) does not disappoint: “growth and
pain often coexist.” Use cognitive exploration, positive disintegration
and psychological flexibility to find meaning in suffering, a la
Viktor Frankl. 2. Easier said than done, but plenty of interventions
have proven to aid the surprisingly common outcome of PTG. 3
Openness to experience and Intellect combine in a figure illustrating
cognitive exploration, with the common outcome of
creative thinking. Good news for fellow introverts capable of impressive
feats of deep work: absorption counts as openness to experience.
4 Experiencing things as doubly real, losing track of time,
getting immersed in art or nature, noting a breakdown between
self and other: these are all healthy manifestations of flow. 5 Page
112 divides Intellect into curiosity/need to understand, and deprivation
sensitivity/need to know. Based on new data (and foreseen
by Maslow), curiosity represents the healthier habit. Rather than
approaching new knowledge with an insecure compulsion to
know, try to maintain an open, flexible curiosity. 6,7
Kaufman carefully delineates the next need, Love, from the
security need of Connection. Instead of needing, higher love is admiring.
Instead of striving for satiation, higher love grows boundlessly.
In this realm, you love someone out of abundance, not scarcity.
Kaufman introduces the “dark triad” here, which is roughly
the opposite of love: grandiose narcissism, Machiavellianism (exploitation
and deceit) and psychopathy. The dark triad correlates
with chronotype, job performance, CEO status and many other
outcomes. 8 Rather than lamenting how psychopathy sometimes
pays off, Kaufman and some buddies invented the light triad (not
even a Wikipedia page yet). The light triad consists of Kantianism
(treating people as ends, not means), Humanism (valuing
the dignity of each person), and faith in humanity (fundamental
goodness of humans). Everyone of course has marks of the dark
and light features, i.e. “the line separating good and evil passes …
right through every human heart.” 9 People who attain this higher
“B-love” galvanize agency and communion among fellow humans.
Exercising their own agency, they see themselves as part of society,
valuing communion. They “transcend the false dichotomy between
in-group love and unconditional love.” Sections on healthy
self-love, quiet ego and authenticity lay the paradoxical foundation
for self-actualization: “the best way to transcend the ego is via
having a strong identity.”
In the third component of the sail, Purpose, we discover that
special situation in which the “work-joy dichotomy disappears.”
Fascinated by Ruth Benedict’s description of synergy, Maslow
spoke of synergistic cultures, “holistically structured and functioning
for mutual benefit of the individual and the larger society
(Kaufman).” Put another way, one who strives for pure self-actualization
automatically helps others, agency meets communion,
“virtue pays (Maslow).” Selflessly seeking your purpose leads to
happiness as an ironic epiphenomenon; chasing happiness directly
is a Sisyphean quest. The Purpose chapter gives advice on organizing
one’s overall life purpose. We learn of moral exemplars,
famous men and women who were virtuous, consistent, brave, inspiring
and humble. Beware though, heroes and villains do share
a few qualities: toughness, bravery, risk-taking and rebelliousness.
Crucially, they differ in that agency-communion interplay: villains
are all agency, heroes value communion. Kaufman reviews data
on grit, equanimity and range. He notes “zero correlation between
having a diversity of interests and being inconsistent in your interests,
but positive correlation between having diverse interests and
persevering in the face of adversity.” Good news for the generalists
out there! 10
TRANSCEND
BOOK REVIEW
With sturdy ships and fierce sails, we can now chase Transcendence.
Heaven, so to speak, lies waiting for us through life, ready to step
into for a time and to enjoy before we have to come back to our ordinary
life of striving. And once we have been in it, we can remember it
forever, and feed ourselves on this memory and be sustained in times
of stress. - Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (1962)
Kaufman and Maslow grapple with paradox and contradiction
in the search for the true, the good and the beautiful (same
things?). According to Maslow, self-actualizers frequently have
“peak experiences,” moments of unity occurring on a spectrum:
normal life → flow → mindfulness → gratitude → love → awe → inspiration
→ peak and mystical experiences.
(continued on page 22)
AUGUST 2020 21