Chapter 14 from desire to need

The mention of current situation and power made me think of another issue about social change, that is, social planning and even social engineering, which we often hear now.Obviously, this set of names is modern and not familiar to rural society.This actually contains an important change. If we want to understand the difference between the power of the current situation and the power of the elders, we have to discuss it in this aspect.It is a major discovery that human beings discover that society can also be planned, which means that human beings have stepped out of the rural society.There is no such idea in rural society.In rural society people can act on their desires, but in modern society desires can no longer guide people's behavior. There are "needs" and therefore "plans".From desire to need is a very important milestone in social change. Let me first distinguish the two concepts of desire and need.

Observing human behavior, we can often see that human beings do not act for the sake of behavior, but act for the sake of activity. Behavior or activity are both means, and they are done for the sake of doing something.Not only can you observe yourself silently, every move has a purpose, you pick up chopsticks when you want to eat, eat when you are hungry... There is always a "want" leading your own activities; you can also ask others : "Why did you come? What's the matter?" We can always get other people's explanations for their behavior from this question.So we say that human behavior is motivated.

There are two meanings in saying that human behavior has motivation. One is that human beings can control their own behavior. If they want to do it, they will do it. There is a basis for time, and this basis is desire.Desire defines the direction of human behavior, which is the "want" mentioned above.This "want" is prior to the behavior. If we want to get it, that is, our desire is satisfied, we will feel happy because of it.In English, desire and want are both want, and want is also inextricable.Lack is not just a description of a state, but contains the meaning of movement. There is a force here, which is caused by discomfort. It pushes the human body to move. This force is also called "tension state", which means This state cannot last long, and must be vented, and venting becomes behavior and satisfaction.Desire-tension-action-satisfaction-pleasure, that is the process of human behavior.

If desire is to be able to control behavior through will, it must be conscious of the actor.Consciousness means that the actor knows what he wants.This is good on the level of desire, but here a problem arises. Human beings act according to their desires. Whether their behaviors are necessarily conducive to the healthy development of individuals and the harmony and cooperation of individuals in society? complete and continuous?This question is raised here not to consider the goodness and evilness of nature, but from the facts of human existence. If we go out of the range of human beings, stand at a distance, and look at human beings as we look at other creatures, we can see Human beings have a long history, and they have done many things that enable human beings to survive and continue, as if the healthy development of individuals and the integrity of society were their goals.But when I took a closer look and asked those people, they revealed a lot of desires that had nothing to do with these purposes.You see men and women approaching each other from a distance, giving birth to a child, men and women cooperating, and raising children. This set of behaviors is necessary for the integrity of society. If no child is born, no one takes care of the child, and human beings die one by one, society will be chaotic. , isn’t the human race cut off?So you are very proud to ask these people, but they tell you, "We are here for love, we don't want children, but the children are here." They will laugh at you because there is no one in the world who has the desire to maintain the human race, Who's thinking about big bookish questions like this when looking for a girlfriend?

Similarly, if you look at it from a distance, every day people are eating starch, fat, vitamin A, vitamin C, a very long list, you went back to the laboratory to study, and found that it is not bad, starch provides heat , Vitamin A gives people this and that—for nutrition and for sustaining life.But if you go to a rural old man who doesn't live in a modern city and ask him why he eats chili and garlic, he will answer you, "This is delicious, it's for dinner." Love, deliciousness, is desire, and that is conscious.It is indeed these desires that directly determine our behaviour.Are the behaviors induced by these desires consistent with the conditions of human existence?This question has been discussed by many scholars.If we look at the above passage, we can't help but feel that human desires are indeed a bit subtle. Although they want this and that, the result is often just in line with their living conditions.What is desire?Food color is also, that is a characteristic that goes deep into the biological foundation.There seems to be an ingenious arrangement here. For the continuation of the race, people will have love between the sexes; for nutrition, people will have the five flavors.Therefore, a theory emerged in the nineteenth century that as long as everyone can be "selfish", that is, fully satisfy the desires brought about by our nature, society will form the best and most harmonious order.Adam Smith said that "the invisible hand in the dark" will arrange a social order for everyone who intends for themselves to live well.

This kind of theory is not based on modern society but rural society, because in rural society, this kind of theory can be said to be correct, and the reason for the correctness is not that there is really a "secret" hand, but rather It is in the rural society that individual desires are often in line with the living conditions of human beings.The two fit together because desire is not a biological fact, but a cultural fact.When I say it is a cultural fact, I mean it is man-made to teach people to think this way.For example, northerners have a desire to eat garlic, which is not hereditary but developed from childhood.The so-called "selfishness" is to think for oneself, but how to do it is learned by the society.The question is not what you want, but what you want.This content is determined by culture.

When I say that desire is a cultural fact, this sentence does not guarantee that all cultural facts are in line with the living conditions of human beings.There is much in culture that is irrelevant or even harmful to the human condition.Take food as an example, if everything our culture allows us to eat is in line with the principle of nutrition, we would not have such things as so-called poisons.Even if we don't talk about poisons, ordinary food can still help prove the saying that "disease enters through the mouth".Going further, I often feel that it is not accurate to regard "survival" as the ultimate value of human beings.If there are some differences between human beings and other animals and plants, the most important thing, in my opinion, is that human beings have found some value standards outside of survival, so-called truth, goodness and beauty.I also often like to use "human beings are the only species that can commit suicide" to explain the difference between human beings and beasts. ——However, subjectively, although human beings have more important values ​​than survival, and although some cultures may be irrelevant and unhelpful to human survival, these cultures that are not suitable for the conditions of survival and the people who accept the culture that is not suitable for the conditions of survival are eliminated in time.They don't exist anymore.The force of elimination is not limited to the culture, but also outside the culture, which is the force of nature.This power is not concerned with value issues; beauty and ugliness, good and evil, truth and falsehood are irrelevant to it, it only lists certain conditions, if it does not meet, go, if it meets, stay.We can think that a sick beauty is beautiful, but nature does not keep her because of her beauty. The sick will die, and health is the condition of survival.Nature does not forbid man to commit suicide, but there is no power that can make a suicide survive.

Then another theory happened.Sun Monan stated clearly in the opening chapter of his famous book Folk ways: Human beings have behaviors first, and then thoughts.Behavior is determined by experience accumulated in formulas of trial and error, thought has only the function of preserving these experiences, conscious desire is the command of culture. In a rural society, this is also correct, because rural society is a traditional society, and tradition is the accumulation of experience, which can be accumulated means that it can withstand natural selection, various "mistakes"-behaviors that are not suitable for living conditions ——The set of lifestyles left behind after being eliminated.Whatever the actors say about these methods, they are necessarily conducive to survival.

What can be mentioned here is that in rural society, there are many behaviors that we think are used to achieve certain desires or goals, but in the objective review, we can see that these behaviors do not satisfy subjective needs , and there is no real connection between the act and the stated purpose.Witchcraft is the most obvious example of this behavior.For example, exorcising ghosts is actually expelling psychological fear.It doesn't matter whether there are ghosts or not, but the fear must be expelled. In the rural society, desire can be used as a guide to behavior after being cultivated by culture, and the result is that it is in line with the living conditions.But this combination of printing and printing is neither conscious nor planned. The subtle collocation in the local culture can be said to be a work of nature, not manpower, although the culture is man-made.This kind of unconscious integration has its disadvantages, that is, if the environment changes, people cannot make active and planned adaptations, and can only find it blindly through mistakes and experimental formulas as Sun Monan said. new way.The rural social environment does not change very much, so the rate of cultural change is also slow. People have time to do blind experiments calmly, and the losses caused by mistakes will not be fatal.In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers could hand over the social order to "an invisible hand in the dark". forces against the planned economy.At such times it is dangerous to maintain the spirit cultivated in rural society.When there is trouble, it is no small matter.

Society is changing rapidly, and the original culture cannot effectively bring satisfaction in life. Human beings have to infer the relationship between behavior and purpose.At this time, I discovered that desire is not the final motivation, but the motivation created to achieve the living conditions.So people began to pay attention to the living conditions themselves—a new concept, "function", appeared in sociology.Function is to see from an objective standpoint the effect of an action on the survival of the individual and the integrity of society.Function is not necessarily conscious of the actor, but the result of analysis, nutrition rather than taste.Here we have changed the condition of existence into self-consciousness, and the condition of self-conscious existence is "need", which is different from "desire".People in modern society began to choose their food for nutrition. This is the era of rationality. Rationality means that people plan their behavior according to the known relationship between means and ends, so it can also be said to be scientific.

Knowledge is power in modern society because people living in such a society plan according to their needs.The power derived from knowledge is what I called the power of the situation above; rural society relies on experience, and they do not need to plan, because in the course of time, nature chooses for them a traditional life plan that is sufficient to rely on.Everyone can act according to their desires.