The Evolution of Intrinsic Motivation
March 1, 2012, began like any other day for Regina Agyare, a software engineer at Fidelity Bank in Ghana. She woke up, got dressed, and had breakfast. She drove to work. She logged onto her computer and checked her emails. But that day wasn’t like any other day. That day, she quit.
She had tried to quit once before. The company wanted to keep her, though, and “they countered with a promotion, a raise, and other incentives,” she told me. That first time, Agyare decided to stay.
But not on March 1. “That day, too, the bank tried to convince me to stay,” Agyare said. “My manager suggested that I stay at least until the end of the month when the bank gave out employee bonuses.” It was tempting, and, again, she reconsidered. But not for long. Something in her just knew it was time to go. By the afternoon, “I packed up my office and left for good.”
“I didn’t have another job lined up, and I didn’t have any grand plans,” Agyare said. But she had a rough idea what she wanted to do. Two weeks later, she started Soronko. Soronko means “unique” in the Ghanaian language of Twi, and it lives up to its name. It’s actually a pair of entities: a for-profit business called Soronko Solutions and the nonprofit Soronko Foundation. “Soronko Solutions provides software development services to small and medium businesses, which are underserved in Ghana even though there are so many of them,” Agyare explained. From the revenue she makes through Soronko Solutions, she applies an astounding 80 percent to fund Soronko Foundation, her true passion. Soronko Foundation teaches technology skills to Ghanaian youths. Its Growing STEMS program provides rural kids with supplementary science and technology classes. “We recently started another program called Tech Needs Girls,” Agyare told me. “We organize women engineers to mentor girls from urban slums in computer programming and entrepreneurial skills.”
Agyare’s work has not gone unnoticed. She has been crowned with laurels by the World Economic Foundation, the Aspen Institute, and Hillary Clinton’s Vital Voices Fellowship. Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg wrote about Agyare in Lean In for Graduates.1 And in 2014 Agyare was selected for the Young African Leaders Initiative begun by President Barack Obama.
In previous chapters, I’ve discussed the best ways to deploy packaged interventions and to nurture the intrinsic growth needed to implement them. But social causes need more than that. They also need people who, leading or following, put in time and resources for the sake of others. Just a few years ago, Regina Agyare appeared to be just like the hundreds of millions of other comfortable adults in the world’s middle and upper classes. She was doing well for herself (which is important!), but her positive impact on others was limited. Then she made a transition.
Advanced Intrinsic Growth
What differentiates the effective social activist from everyone else? And what causes the difference?
I know Agyare well because she was the top student in my calculus class at Ashesi University. Then as now, she had the bearing of a queen, confident and graceful. She liked doing things her own way and at her own tempo. (She also once threw a pie in my face. I had assigned a tedious problem set, and I wanted to give the students a chance at payback. She rushed to volunteer as the class’s angel of revenge.)
Back then, Agyare had little interest either in starting her own firm or in mentoring groups of Ghanaian girls. She was focused on securing her own future. “One of the classes I took at Ashesi was about entrepreneurship,” she said. “I told the lecturer that I didn’t see myself starting a company. At the time, I just wanted a dependable job.” She studied computer science and expected to become a programmer.
But while Ashesi offers majors in technical subjects, its mission is much broader; the school’s motto is “Scholarship, leadership, and citizenship.” Agyare remembers that the school expected students to become “a new generation of ethical leaders,” whether in business, academia, government, or other fields.
The administration tried to model this behavior through a standing policy of never paying bribes, even though that meant that some things slowed to a snail’s crawl in the Augean muck of local bureaucracy. Extracurricular service activities were encouraged. In the year I taught there, students raised funds for a local charity that worked with blind children. And an honor code the students proudly followed held them to a high standard of integrity. During the university’s accreditation process, the government questioned whether students could be trusted to police themselves and recommended stricter oversight. The students rebelled with a passionate and ultimately successful appeal. They argued, “If we cannot maintain a culture of honesty as students, then how can we be expected to do it when we grow up to become the nation’s leaders?”
The seeds that Ashesi planted in its students bloomed in Agyare. “We’d been taught that we could change the world,” she said, and she wanted to do her part. But how? “When I graduated, a good friend of mine started a business right away. But I wasn’t sure that I could do the same – I had no capital, no experience, no network.” So, for seven years, she worked a series of corporate jobs. She bided her time until she was ready.
When I asked Agyare why she finally left Fidelity Bank, she had many reasons. “My first manager was terrific – he understood technology, gave me credit for my work, and let me set my own milestones,” she said. “But he left, and let’s just say my new manager did less of those things.” There had also been a series of reorganizations at the firm, the result of which was to leave Agyare with pettier colleagues and fewer interesting opportunities. “The straw that broke the camel’s back was when the bank started outsourcing technology projects to foreign companies,” she said. “When I first joined the bank, I liked it because they promoted it as a local bank built and run by Ghanaians.”
Meanwhile, her desire to strike out on her own was gradually growing. Slowly, she gained experience. Slowly, she gained confidence. And slowly, she built up a supportive network. About March 1, she said, “Even that day when I woke up, I didn’t know I was going to resign.”
In the years before she quit, Agyare wanted to ensure a secure livelihood. She had positive intention for her future self. She had a solid base of knowledge and the discernment to land good jobs. She had the self-control to see her goals through. In a nutshell, she had enough heart, mind, and will to secure personal well-being and success.
But by the time she started Soronko, Agyare’s intentions had expanded. She was no longer content to serve herself and her employer; she wanted to contribute to the betterment of children who lacked her advantages. She also had greater discernment and self-control: “I was just more confident and more experienced. I had skills and I had passion. And I remembered what I did at Ashesi, when I held leadership roles like being president of a social club, vice president of a women’s group, and a peer educator about HIV/AIDS. By the time that I left, I just knew that I could do something on my own.”
So the key difference between Agyare before and after her bank job is more heart, mind, and will, more intrinsic growth. Of course, there were other factors. After seven years of work, Agyare had some savings, making it easier for her to leave behind a steady paycheck. She also had a stronger network to call upon for support. But if Agyare had had those things at the start of her career, would they have been enough? She thinks not. “I didn’t see myself as an entrepreneur,” she said. “It required too much initiative.”
Agyare’s case suggests that with more heart, mind, and will – if you take intrinsic growth further and further – you reach a tipping point of sorts. A point where you become a net contributor to social causes. Intrinsic growth is both the basis for those suffering from social problems to rise above them and the reason why those who are secure in their own well-being contribute on behalf of others. The difference is one of degree: a larger radius of intention, keener discernment, and greater self-control. In other words, more intrinsic growth is the root controllable cause of all positive social change, whether you start poor or rich, oppressed or oppressing, powerless or powerful.
Changing People
Technocrats – especially the economists among them – say that people respond to incentives, and by incentives, they usually mean money. The standard “rational choice model” of economics postulates that everyone works selfishly to maximize her or his own utility, most often measured, again, in dollars.2
Of course, for many people, money is not the only incentive. It’s often not even the primary one. Economists themselves offer plenty of counterexamples. Here are a set of rational people who are the world’s experts on money. If their main goal were to maximize financial utility, they would all chase after the best-paying jobs on Wall Street. Some economists do just that, but there are plenty of others who become professors, policymakers, and journalists who aren’t achieving their full earning potential.
What’s more, there are economists who’ve held previous jobs in banking and finance and who have quit to pursue less lucrative careers. I’ve run into a few people like that, and the reasons they gave for switching include: “I got sick of the rat race, although I was a well-paid rat”; “I wanted to do something that was more intellectually rewarding”; “Time with my family became more important”; “I wanted to be my own boss”; and “I was looking for something with more meaning.”
These responses betray two radical deviations from the dominant economics. First, none of the transitions were about earning more money. They were about family, autonomy, recognition, intellectual reward, and social impact. Money was still important – few took on work without pay, and many of them could afford to change jobs because they had a fluffy financial cushion. But the desire for wealth was satiated at some point, and other desires took over.
Second, people changed. Preferences evolved. Human nature isn’t fixed – people’s motivations change over time. Some who leave lucrative jobs take a cut in pay or give up a paycheck altogether. A few even begin giving away the wealth they’ve accumulated. Nor is this kind of change limited only to economists. Agyare is a standout example, but, as we’ll see, she’s hardly alone.
The Role of Aspirations
Whether it’s economists or engineers, or, for that matter, farmers or factory workers, the cause of a voluntary life change is often a change in aspiration. In Agyare’s case, we see a very clear shift from wanting a solid, dependable job to being her own boss and making a larger societal contribution.
Aspirations are potent forces, and it’s a cliché to encourage their pursuit. But some truth must underlie this mother of all commencement-speech exhortations. In fact, there are at least four reasons why aspirations are so meaningful.
First, aspirations challenge a person to aim for something better, “for something above one,” as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it.3 Throughout her adult life, Agyare’s aspirational concerns were for her own future welfare and then for the welfare of others. For some time now, I have been asking people I meet what they would like to change about themselves or their lives over the next five years. In Kenya, I inserted the question into a sample survey of 2,000 respondents who cut across all walks of life. So far, every single response has been positive. They fall into a dozen broad categories. They want to fulfill basic needs, earn more income, nurture their families, achieve personal growth, or live more spiritual lives. And, though the survey doesn’t reveal whether some aspirations might be expressed in dubious ways, no one aspires to crime and corruption for its own sake.4 Aspirations urge us forward in the epic human quest against complacency.
Second, aspirations are intrinsic, even if they are influenced by external factors. Agyare wasn’t shackled by the golden handcuffs of the tech industry. She left when she could no longer ignore the beat of her inner drummer. Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan defined the related concept of intrinsic motivation as “the prototypical form of self-determination: with a full sense of choice, with the experience of doing what one wants, and without the feeling of coercion or compulsion, one spontaneously engages in an activity that interests one.”5 It’s not an aspiration if a person has to be coerced or asked. Aspirations come from within.
Third, aspirations are slow and sticky. They sustain for the long haul. Intrinsic growth doesn’t happen in a day, so any force that doesn’t last won’t be enough to inspire it. Agyare’s path from student to entrepreneur and activist took eleven years, during which she expended consistent effort. Something had to pull her through the demanding course load at Ashesi, and something had to keep her going at work – not just to earn income, but to learn and grow. Of course, throughout that time, other internal forces – needs, fears, desires, irrational impulses; reasoned goals to be richer, kinder, healthier, and happier – competed for her attention. But these were fleeting compared with the pull of her primary aspirations. Psychologist Kennon Sheldon has spent much of his career researching the value of setting and striving toward intrinsically motivated, or self-concordant, goals. He and his colleagues have found that “individuals do better at self-concordant goals because they put more sustained effort into such goals.”6 Take the long view and average out the choppy waves of our minute-by-minute moods, and what remains are the slow tidal swells of aspiration.
Fourth, it was by chasing her aspirations that Agyare underwent critical intrinsic growth. She admits that even if she had wanted to start Soronko earlier in her life, she wouldn’t have been ready. It’s not an easy thing to start your own company. And to succeed at both a for-profit and a nonprofit at once is another thing altogether. What equipped her with the skills and strength she needed?
What she learned through her early aspirations enabled her later ones to develop. Agyare’s first aspiration helped her gain knowledge and professional discernment. Building a new organization requires business acumen, management capability, and leadership skills, all of which Agyare learned in her first career. It also seems likely that years of academic life and professional work further built up her self-control. Ashesi routinely graduates high achievers. Corporate high-tech Ghana is much like the high-tech world elsewhere: It values a hard-charging work ethic. That mental and emotional stamina supported Agyare as she built Soronko. Following her aspirations led to a sharper mind and greater will.7
It’s important, though, that in meeting one’s aspirations, some striving is involved. An aspiration achieved without effort doesn’t build wisdom. “Undeserved” fame or fortune doesn’t necessarily cause growth, because they’re not accompanied by internal change. The spoiled children of inherited wealth are not particularly wise. The same problem occurs at a national scale when the resource curse of oil and minerals corrupts leaders and stunts other industries.8 Even more stable countries are prone to “Dutch disease,” where the availability of an easy resource displaces other productive capacity, just as an overused crutch can lead to muscular atrophy.9 Apparent exceptions only affirm the rule. There are trust-fund children who increase the prestige of their families, but they’re focused on more than collecting baubles and living a lavish social life. Among nations, there is, for example, Norway, which took a windfall from North Sea oil, invested it carefully, and pumped some of the returns into one of the world’s most generous foreign aid programs.10
That striving after aspirations leads to greater mind and will is not surprising. Intentional effort leads to learning. What’s most noteworthy about Agyare’s intrinsic growth is her change in heart. She underwent a fundamental change in intention – from being focused primarily on serving her own economic, intellectual, and emotional needs through a corporate job to becoming increasingly focused on serving the needs of others. “It took me four years and a lot of sleepless nights to realize that when you have a dream and a desire, it is like an alarm clock going off inside you,” she said. “Hitting the snooze button doesn’t work; the alarm will just go off again. Eventually, you have to wake up.”11
A New Beginning
Long before Agyare started at Ashesi University – years in fact before there was an Ashesi at all – Patrick Awuah vowed that he would never return to live in Ghana. He was visiting his home country in 1990 when he became disgusted by its political corruption, economic stagnation, and social backwardness. Five years earlier, he was among the lucky few who, due to a combination of wise parenting and strong academic accomplishments, earned a full scholarship to Swarthmore University in the United States. His dream then was to become an engineer and to buy a new house for his mother. He majored in electrical engineering and economics. Upon graduation he joined Microsoft as a program manager. Over ten years, he proceeded up the corporate ladder rung by rung.12
That decade marked the golden years of Microsoft. It was a period when Awuah and his colleagues worked day and night to realize the company’s mission to put a PC on every desk. The market responded with an industry boom whose reverberations grow louder even today. Through stock and options, the company shared its skyrocketing profits with its employees. The first Microsoft millionaires were minted.
By 1995, Awuah was comfortably among them. Having achieved and exceeded his dreams of just a decade earlier, though, he began to ask if there wasn’t more to life than technical feats and his family’s financial well-being. He felt incredibly blessed and wanted to share his good fortune. Reflecting on his life, he felt a critical point for him was his Swarthmore education. Its strong liberal arts program marked the point where his path and that of his high-school peers diverged. Based on this conviction, and with encouragement from his wife, Awuah decided to start a liberal arts college in Ghana. In 1998, he quit Microsoft.
He enrolled in UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where he focused every class project on the question of how to start the university. In 2002, spurred by a quotation attributed to Goethe – “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!”13 – Awuah launched Ashesi University in Ghana’s capital city of Accra. Defying his earlier vow, he moved back to the country with his family soon afterward.
“Ashesi” means “beginning” in Fanti, the language of Awuah’s ancestors, and the name has proven auspicious. Starting with the initial class of 25 students, whom I taught in rented space, the school has grown to 600 students studying in a beautiful new campus. Talented students flock to Ashesi not only from within Ghana but from across West Africa. International development experts cite the school as an example of what can be accomplished by a country’s own people.14 Other private universities have sprung up in Africa to follow its lead.
Ashesi is an unqualified story of successful social change. But while Awuah’s professional life is steeped in computing technology, the lessons of his life don’t have much to do with the tools he used. What matters is his transformation from a young man eager to study abroad, to a program manager in a large corporation, to a visionary who invested his wealth, sweat, and soul in a cause that is changing Africa. In other words, it’s not about the packaged intervention.
Transformational Internal Epiphanies
Something happens as aspirations are achieved through valiant effort. When dreams come true, some people notice that they’ve outgrown them. Awuah says that in his last year at Microsoft, “I lost the sense of urgency that I had before. The work just felt less important.” People talk of missing something in their lives and of wanting something more, something they might have postponed or never have imagined before. They feel an intrinsic change. It’s not that they gain new knowledge. Don’t we all know, after all, that there’s more to life than whatever we happen to be chasing right now? Rather, they move on to a different, deeply felt aspiration. At some point, Awuah was no longer attracted to the extra 10 percent of income, recognition, or accomplishment that he had spent years pursuing. He wanted work with a broader purpose.
These kinds of stories are common fodder for heartwarming news articles, but they are rarely discussed by policymakers. No one in the US government, the World Bank, or the Gates Foundation is asking, “How do we encourage people through transformational internal epiphanies?”
Partly, the problem is that today’s metric-focused technocrats all but laugh at what seem like soft intangibles. Partly, the problem is that policy is disconnected from fields that consider these changes of heart. Partly, it’s that the fields that once used to think about deep questions like this have stopped asking them. So much of behavioral science today overlooks long-term human change in favor of easily measured short-term phenomena. It focuses on catchy factoids, such as that finding a dime left in a phone booth can make you temporarily more likely to help others.15 As a result, modern social policy is obsessed with the equivalent of strategically placed coins – tricks and nudges to incentivize “behavior change.”16 But while behavior change might be a more meaningful goal than the willy-nilly scattering of technologies, it’s fleeting. And it casts individuals as adversaries to be manipulated, as if people just can’t be trusted to do the right thing on their own. The alternative is to ask, What makes a person intrinsically motivated for the larger social good? What makes a Patrick Awuah or a Regina Agyare? Today’s number-crunching disciplines have no answer to such questions.
But developmental psychology does. Psychologists going back to Sigmund Freud have sought to explain human maturation as a staged process of personality, character, or life-cycle development.17 Freud was joined by many others. Thinkers such as Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget, and Lawrence Kohlberg tried to map out aspects of long-term human development.18 Some of their claims have been discredited by modern psychology, but in acknowledging the possibility of lifelong, intrinsically powered growth, they offer an alternative to today’s fast-twitch policymaking.
And they are far better suited to explaining transformations such as Awuah’s. His trajectory was defined by his successive aspirations. As a student he “wanted to be a great engineer. My father was a mechanical engineer, and I’d read magazine articles about things like the Space Shuttle. I thought it was cool.” At Microsoft he did exactly the kind of work he once admired. “Growing up in Ghana, whenever I read about technological advances, they were always happening abroad,” he said. “In my job, though, I was at the center of it. We worked on computer networking when it was going mainstream. I knew some kid would read about what I was working on and think, ‘That’s awesome!’” Awuah says he came to love “the technical challenges of the work and the intensity of the workplace.”
Then, after nearly ten years of that work, “being in a meeting to decide what a button should do or what feature to cut stopped seeming that important.” What happened? We’ve already encountered Agyare, who after years of corporate work, struck out on her own. Similarly, Rikin Gandhi left a software engineering job at Oracle and astronaut dreams to found Digital Green. Abraham George returned to India to establish Shanti Bhavan after attaining entrepreneurial success in America. Trish Millines Dziko was a Microsoft employee before she went on to start the Technology Access Foundation. Bill Gates made a public transition from amassing one of the world’s largest fortunes to spending it on global philanthropy. And when I ran the research group in Bangalore, I received inquiries every week from professionals who wanted to work with us. They would say, “I’ve done well for myself, but I’d now like to see how I can give back to society.” There’s a good chance that you know people like this, or maybe you are one.
Without taking away from anyone’s uniqueness – each of these people is a gem on the pebble beach of humanity – there’s no doubt that a pattern is at work.19 A pattern of human maturation. A pattern of intrinsic growth. A pattern of expanding heart, mind, and will.
Maslovian Development
Developmental psychology has many theories that could explain this pattern. The one that best fits what I’ve witnessed is the well-known hierarchy of needs developed by the psychologist Abraham Maslow. Lists of the world’s eminent psychologists inevitably include Maslow, and his ideas have taken firm root in fields well beyond psychology.20 But if Maslow’s hierarchy is a bit of a celebrity meme, it has suffered for its popularity – it’s widely misunderstood. Many people have heard about the hierarchy from pop psychology, and while some of what they’ve heard is correct, it’s mixed with inaccurate rumor-mongering. For example, most depictions of it involve a rainbow-colored pyramid that Maslow never used. The wrong interpretations don’t explain Awuah or Agyare.
In its original form, Maslow’s hierarchy was a series of five motivational categories: Survival needs such as hunger, thirst, and the need for sleep motivate a person to seek food, water, or shelter. Security needs drive a person toward physical and psychological security – freedom from fear and anxiety, desire for structure and order, and so on. Needs for love and belonging are met through social acceptance, community, and companionship. Esteem needs demand recognition, status, achievement, and competence. And the need for self-actualization causes people to do things that express their unique talents and preferences, what “he or she, individually, is fitted for,” whether it’s playing in a rock band, managing a corporate division, or being a good parent.21
Maslow suggested that these needs – which everyone shares – were sorted by their urgency: “It is quite true the humans live by bread alone – when there is no bread. But what happens to their desires when there is plenty of bread and when their bellies are chronically filled? At once other (and higher) needs emerge and these, rather than physiological hungers, dominate the organism. And when these in turn are satisfied, again new (and still higher) needs emerge, and so on” (emphasis in original).22
As immediate hunger is satisfied, more security is sought; as security needs are satisfied, esteem becomes more important; as the need for esteem is satisfied, self-actualization becomes a stronger motivator.
Less understood is Maslow’s claim that people are “multimotivated” and that behavior is “multidetermined.” People have multiple needs at once, even if one might dominate. At any time, each of a person’s needs might be satisfied to different degrees: “It is as if the average citizen is satisfied perhaps 85 percent in physiological needs, 70 percent in safety needs, 50 percent in love needs, 40 percent in self-esteem needs, and 10 percent in self-actualization needs.”23 And any single behavior might be motivated by multiple needs. We work hard at our jobs because pay and benefits satisfy physiological needs, security needs, and esteem needs; the recognition for our work satisfies esteem needs; and, if the work is deeply interesting to us, it is an expression of self-actualization. Depending on the nature of the job, the reward package, and one’s attitudes, each of these components will have different weight.
Maslow Revisited
Maslow has had his critics, and they have questioned everything from the number and substance of his levels to their ordering, their individualistic focus, and their bias toward his own gender and culture.24 (Personally, I’m not convinced that Maslow’s “belonging needs” are a single level in the hierarchy as much as a set of needs that runs parallel to the others.) Some of these criticisms are valid, but many are based on a poor reading of Maslow.25 A truer understanding explains how individual intrinsic growth such as Awuah’s can happen.
One pervasive mistake is to see self-actualization as the top of the hierarchy.26 Maslow kept reworking the hierarchy throughout his life. He wondered, for example, whether esteem needs might be further broken down into two levels – one for public recognition and another for private achievement or mastery.27 And more relevant for Awuah, Maslow also realized that “self-actualization is not enough.” He gestured at an additional level that could be called self-transcendence.28 Self-transcendence tends toward “the good of other people,” toward egolessness and altruism.
Self-transcendence is essential to explaining Awuah’s evolution, because he didn’t stop with self-actualizing work. Awuah says that toward the latter half of his time at Microsoft, he felt a growing desire to contribute to the larger world. “The birth of my son as well as events in Africa” catalyzed his transition, he said, referring to the Rwandan genocide and the Somalian civil war. His life path shows the clear pull of self-transcendence overtaking needs for security, esteem, achievement, and self-actualization.
Yet another misreading of Maslow’s theory goes like this: Some people go on hunger strikes to protest injustice; their physiological needs don’t prevail over other motivations; so something must be wrong with the hierarchy.29 Actually, though, this example offers proof of something else. Maslow knew that there were both intrinsic and extrinsic causes of behavior and said that different people felt the pull of lower needs differently: “It is precisely those individuals in whom a certain need has always been satisfied who are best equipped to tolerate deprivation of that need in the future.”30
So Maslow’s hierarchy is actually two hierarchies. One – about the influence of external conditions on behavior – explains why most of us would prefer to go three days without self-actualizing work than three days without water. That’s the hierarchy of needs as it’s popularly understood. The other hierarchy – about intrinsic motivation – explains what allows some people to sacrifice lower needs for the sake of higher ones. A hunger striker puts self-transcendent goals ahead of survival needs. That shows a kind of maturity, an ability to suppress or ignore more urgent needs in the service of a larger aspiration. To distinguish this internal gradient from the external hierarchy of needs, I’ll refer to it as the hierarchy of aspirations.31
Maslow saw this internal growth as a good thing. He called it “character learning” or “intrinsic learning,” which is part and parcel of intrinsic growth.32 Improvements in intention, discernment, and self-control allow a person to act not just in pursuit of pressing, self-focused, short-term needs, but also toward longer-term outcomes that may enhance others’ well-being. At the lowest level are physiological aspirations, which are narrowly self-, present-, and material-focused. Someone operating primarily at this level sees the world as a raw fight for survival. That narrow focus is stretched with security aspirations, however, which are still self-focused but require some future planning and cooperation to obtain. Next come esteem and achievement aspirations, which begin to incorporate nonmaterial needs and further instill longer-term focus and the drive to cooperate.33 Still, these aspirations remain basically selfish, and selfishness continues all the way through self-actualization. In fact, self-actualization could be thought of as the height of selfishness. Self-actualizers are most interested in ensuring their own long-term happiness – materially, intellectually, and emotionally. (This might be one reason why various studies suggest that today’s creative classes seem more narcissistic than ever.34) But their selfishness is not like the selfishness of brutish survival – it can express itself as enlightened self-interest. Aspirants to self-actualization are often vocal in protecting universal freedoms, because they have both the slack and the desire to guarantee their own right to self-expression. Lastly, there are self-transcendent aspirations whose focus on self gives way to genuinely selfless concern for others. All the way through, intentions embrace larger and larger circles of humanity. With greater Maslovian development, people become more future-oriented, more other-oriented, and more other-oriented toward larger groups of people.
Awuah is a good example. He became less interested in esteem and self-actualization once he could take them for granted. Something internal changed as he learned new skills and grew more confident in his ability to excel in a satisfying career. Maslow suggested that these shifts happen when a need “has always been satisfied.” A more robust explanation, though, would be that shifts occur when a person feels thoroughly confident in being able to satisfy a need, either due to his or her own ability or through societal provision.35 In any case, it’s because Awuah is motivated mainly – though probably not solely – by higher needs that lower needs cease to exert strong pull. He has skipped many lunches for the sake of establishing a new university. He not only let go of a high-income career, but also spent much of his wealth on the cause. And, most telling, whatever sacrifice he felt – “I won’t lie to you – it was tough” to leave Microsoft, Awuah said – it didn’t get in the way of his new aspiration.36
In contrast, someone who aspires primarily to survival or security would not feel comfortable making Awuah’s tradeoffs. A shocking illustration is a story told to Kevin Bales, an expert on global slavery and president of the nonprofit Free the Slaves. An Indian couple who were locked in bonded labor came into an inheritance that allowed them to pay back a familial debt and buy their freedom. But then, the husband says: “We paid off our debt and were free to do whatever we wanted. But I was worried all the time – what if one of the children got sick? What if our crop failed? What if the government wanted some money? Since we no longer belonged to the landlord, we didn’t get food every day as before. Finally, I went to the landlord and asked him to take me back. I didn’t have to borrow any money, but he agreed to let me be his [bonded plowman] again.”37
This couple had freedom, but then voluntarily returned to conditions of slavery for the sake of guaranteed food and security, proving the powerful pull of Maslow’s physiological and security needs when both are under systemic threat.38 Aspirations for achievement or esteem, let alone self-actualization and self-transcendence, are nowhere in sight. Some people seek greater income at the expense of a satisfying career; others don’t mind low pay if the job fulfills a deep creative urge. Some people are magnanimous only when they’re acknowledged for it; others are consistently generous, indifferent to recognition. These kinds of differences are explained by the hierarchy of aspirations.
One thing about the hierarchy is that it allows for the twisty evolution of aspirations. Take the example of some poor communities that pressure their members to share material goods. They make it difficult for individuals to accumulate wealth. This makes sense for collective survival in severe circumstances, but it can discourage private effort. A social norm that instead respects personal property rights can motivate individuals, and it encourages material growth. At some level of prosperity, though, selfish accumulation can lead to stark inequalities that strain the social fabric. Sharing once again becomes important, though perhaps in a less personal or communal way. Thus, intrinsic growth can be a climb with switchbacks: Progress means that sharing will give way to private ownership, which evolves into enlightened sharing. Similarly, people grow from dependence to independence to interdependence; from unwanted poverty to prosperity to contentment; from oppression to freedom to responsibility; from helplessness to confidence to humility. The qualitative changes inherent in the hierarchy allow a Hegelian back-and-forth that constantly strives for balance, synthesis, and maturation.
The climbing analogy helps clarify other points. First, the hierarchy doesn’t imply inexorable upward motion. It’s possible to regress, stagnate, or vacillate. At most, the hierarchy is a map, and maps by themselves don’t decide where people go. Also, the map says little about the flora and fauna you might encounter. The hierarchy of aspirations only captures one aspect of human personality relevant for social causes. The theory leaves everything else about our infinitely rich behavior unexplained and unconstrained.
Individuals also begin at different altitudes and climb at different speeds. Awuah was raised by parents who weren’t struggling for survival, so he took subsistence for granted – undeniably a more advantaged starting point than, say, Isaac Tuggun’s. Other people start with self-actualization as a given. They might proceed right into self-transcendence. This suggests that children raised to be comfortable with one set of aspirations can aspire for more. In a letter to his wife, John Adams, America’s second president, wrote: “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.”39 The progression goes from the hard and practical to the constructive and exploratory and eventually to the artistic and self-expressive.40 More than a century and a half before Maslow, Adams mapped out a path for his offspring from security to achievement, and from achievement to self-actualization.
Confronting the Tech Commandments
As I’ve worked with poor and marginalized communities, I’ve encountered a wide range of amazing people: alcoholic men who became virtual teetotalers after taking up meaningful work; an ostracized victim of gang rape who started an organization that rescued prostitutes; former ethnic antagonists who came together to build a hospital; an engineering graduate who moved to an impoverished village he supported for decades; and more than a few destitute nonprofit beneficiaries who made a transition to capable and reasonably paid nonprofit staff. These personal metamorphoses aren’t frequent by any means, but neither are they altogether rare. When they occur, they signal an evolution like Agyare’s and Awuah’s. They’re accompanied by a surge of intrinsic growth. They inspire others. And they shine and shimmer against the inertness of packaged interventions.
What’s missing in today’s main paradigms of social change is any notion of intrinsic human progress. You might admire Tuggun and Sreenivasa for their ability to lead independent lives despite hard initial conditions. Or you might praise Agyare and Awuah for their larger contributions to society. Either way, what you’re really saying is that the world needs more people to become better versions of themselves. But we have no basis for acting on that idea without a framework of internal human betterment.
The dominant voices in public policy model people as having the same fixed preferences.41 Most economists, for example, think about how to tune external incentives to produce mass changes in behavior.42 Market mechanisms are exalted precisely because they sculpt the supposedly granite hardness of human greed into architecture that uplifts us all. Few think about causing long-term changes in society through growth in individual character.43
But even economists’ most vocal critics – qualitative scholars who emphasize culture, context, and complexity – don’t offer frameworks of individual progress. Some cultural anthropologists instead celebrate the diversity of human behavior that results from a diversity of context. Under their cultural relativism, human beings adapt intelligently to their geography, history, culture, and structures of power. All peoples are equally worthy, and there is little allowance for either personal or societal progress.44
The economic and anthropological models of human behavior sit at opposite extremes of the social science spectrum – the fields are often at odds in the way of snakes and mongooses – but they still have one trait in common: They assume that behavior depends largely on external context, so they focus on changing external circumstances while neglecting intrinsic growth.45
The same neglect happens in politics. During America’s 2012 presidential debates, the candidates presented what they felt were their most appealing positions. Obama captured the left’s emphasis on external forces outside of the person: “The federal government has the capacity to help open up opportunity and create ladders of opportunity and to create frameworks where the American people can succeed.” Representing the right, Mitt Romney said, “The primary responsibility for education of course is at the state and local level. . . . Every school district, every state should make that decision on their own.” The left is afraid of blaming victims and downplays individual intrinsic growth. The right leaves communities short on intrinsic growth to fend for themselves.46 Either way, intrinsic growth is neglected where it’s most needed.
That neglect lines right up with the Tech Commandments, which demand that we twiddle external circumstances and steer clear of wrestling with values. But social inequities cannot be eliminated with value-free changes alone. Disparities are due in part to individual differences in traits to which we ascribe value. It cannot be true both that intrinsic growth matters to a good life and that more intrinsic growth isn’t somehow better. We can debate what makes a person good, and we should. But pretending that everyone is equally good, or dismissing virtue-building policies as those of a “nanny state,” undermines attempts to foster heart, mind, and will.
Imagine if, with the wave of a magic wand, the wealth of everyone on the planet were suddenly to increase, and imagine the windfall happened progressively, so that dollar-a-day people had their wealth multiplied by ten, while billionaires saw only a 1 percent increase. With that one spell, you’d have generated economic growth, more equality, greater dignity, increased freedom, and instantaneous happiness. Yet it is not at all clear that the world will have become a better place in the long run. The happiness would fade, we’d consume even more, and poorer people would slip back into poverty. Suppose, instead, that the spell created a sudden increase in everyone’s heart, mind, and will, with no other change. That would tend to lead naturally to economic growth where desired (and less where not), more justice, greater dignity, more freedom with responsibility, and increased likelihood for enduring global well-being.
Intrinsic growth stresses internal maturation over external change. It accepts that real progress is slow and gradual. And it links progress to the flourishing of certain universal values – not only of personal freedoms, but of personal goodness. A framework of human development provides a counter to the Tech Commandments. Real progress isn’t strictly about satisfying our every present desire. It’s about our desires themselves evolving.