Those who govern societies respond to people’s needs according to their perspective of us. The design of a habitat is different if it is for pigs or for eagles; if it is for animals or free beings. The Abraham Maslow Needs Scale has been an influential and representative approach. Maslow argues that needs are organized from the most basic such as food, shelter and clothing, and move up to less basic levels such as security, self-esteem, relational, until finally altruism and other spiritual needs. In his scheme, the human being first satisfies basic needs before attending to those of a higher level. At first glance it sounds logical, but… it carries the implicit notion that basic needs are important, and higher needs are desirable but ultimately dispensable. For those who live in poverty, the spiritual life would be an unattainable luxury.

Fortunately, it is not. Viktor Frankl, neurologist and psychiatrist, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, makes scientific analysis as a witness and protagonist in the Nazi death camps. He notes that in the effort to survive some were capable of anything vile and base. But there were also those who sacrificed their own basic needs to help friends and even strangers. Finally, he concludes that in his findings, the best chances of survival were not given by health or physical strength, nor by education, intelligence or cunning, but by having a reason for living beyond oneself. Those who survived did it because they wanted to do it for a loved one, for a work to be done, for something to give themselves to.

In the most adverse and deprived situation of all, man is capable of giving up his own welfare for others. “Man is saved by love …” says Frankl. There are those who want to build human ecologies deprived of the spiritual. Materialistic totalitarian states; economic models based only on selfishness and self-satisfaction; cynicism and doubt in the face of authentic love and friendship; skepticism of every ideal and principle; giving a sense of self-reference to one’s own life: all recipes for a human being closed in on himself, decadent and with no reason to live.

Darwin himself would conclude that these self-centered societies, by disdaining the work of having children, decree their own extinction, showing themselves less apt to survive.