Need and value, one pushes and the other pulls!

What motivates and drives you every day to get up, to live, to behave in such and such a way?

What makes him endure the most pressing, most difficult situations of scarcity, hunger, thirst, captivity, humiliation, and punishment?

Man is just another animal species, but his species, the hominins, is 2,8 million years old, if we look at it from Homo Erectus, or more recently, between 300.000 and 100.000 years old, if we look at it from Homo Sapiens; however, this species has evolved, it has self-awareness, symbolism, reason, logic, cognition, but also love, compassion, nobility, solidarity, happiness, responsibility, respect, pride, among so many other values ​​that guide him in his life; the sum of these attitudes and aptitudes has allowed him to improve his adaptation to the environment and the transformation of nature, in many cases, or perhaps it should be said in some cases. 

They have also made him weak, perverse, predatory, inhuman, bringing him to the brink of his own destruction as a species and that of the planet he inhabits and sustains him.

It is important to clarify that humans do not act on instinct; they have developed a system of regulation and guidance of behavior that we call character, and that is where values ​​come in.

What are need and value?

They are often used interchangeably, but there is a subtle difference: one focuses on what is lacking, on what is, and the other on what should be. You could say it's a matter of perspective.

There is no doubt that if we are thirsty and have gone several days without the precious liquid, water, it will be the driving force, the engine of our actions, our attention, our priority; our willingness will be greater towards that good. 

Similarly, if you are hungry, food will be more of a priority, more valuable, than a computer with the appropriate hardware to run the latest model of Generative Artificial Intelligence.  

The willingness to prioritize the desire for one "something" over another will depend on needs and circumstances.

It would seem, then, that the value of "something" - good, service, feeling, belief, behavior - whose relative human disposition of preference, desire, changes based on needs, context, and circumstances. 

While necessity pushes, courage attracts; the strength of that push depends on circumstances, and what does the strength of that attraction depend on?

There, philosophy and science have been trying to figure out where the basis of this change in relative arrangement lies. 

Philosophy, particularly the Enlightenment thinkers, attributed reason to pure logic, a purely logical, mental exercise that should dominate instincts and impulses. Others, from within philosophy, have established an objective hierarchy of values ​​that transcends reason, such as Scheler's hierarchy, from least to greatest: pleasant (pleasure/pain), vital (health, vigor, well-being), spiritual (beauty, justice, truth), and religious (the sacred and the profane).

Psychologists have developed hierarchies of needs based on these hierarchies of values, changing the focus.

Others, in a multidisciplinary exercise—an economist, a sociologist, and a philosopher, all Latin American—at the end of the 20th century, made an integrative proposal combining, in a two-dimensional matrix, the psychological approach, with axiological needs (what human beings seek to develop fully, the realms of meaning), and the philosophical approach, with existential needs (how life is expressed, dimensions of being and living through which existence is embodied). They do not establish hierarchies or scales, only interrelationships. In this matrix, values ​​are the attributes assigned to the satisfiers that fill the cells where the rows and columns intersect. This matrix allowed these researchers, in practice, to conduct an empirical study in communities in several countries of the Latin American region, addressing a wider range of needs and satisfiers (1986, "Human Scale Development").

But man does not live by bread alone. 

This expression contrasts with:

“Love and self-interest went to the countryside one day, and self-interest proved stronger than the love I had for him.”

“Everyone has a price”

Is it naive to believe that one can do without bread, or are there more transcendental values ​​that are only discovered in life's most extreme situations? 

Is it Schopenhauer's will to live, or those spiritual or religious values ​​mentioned earlier, that allow one to survive in captivity, in a desert, in situations of calamity?

Is an existence centered on having the only possible one? 

 In today's market economy, value is reduced to a commodity—good or service—and relative willingness is reduced to the price one is willing to pay for it. Similarly, behavior is reduced to purchasing and consumption. 

Having and consuming are the center of life; other expressions of existence—being, doing, and existing—are dependent on it, and in any case, they occupy a secondary role.

In this world of life, the most popular stress-relief therapy being promoted is "shopping," as if there were nothing else to do.  

A world of life is normalized and naturalized - it is disguised as organic - and it is believed to be the only possible one. 

In life, there are situations where money, the market, and property disappear, lose their meaning, become worthless, and lose their significance. Ask a survivor of the First and Second World Wars, a prisoner who survived a concentration camp like Auschwitz, a survivor of a natural disaster where everything was lost, including family members, or a survivor of the Great Recession that lasted a decade. So, what allowed them to move forward? 

Resilience, values ​​and need

Need drives, values ​​attract, guide, orient; the question is, which ones? Who decides which values ​​to choose?

You decide, or others decide, such as ideologies, understood as social rationalizations; this includes political, religious, and other ideologies.

Discovering your own set of values ​​is a process that not everyone undertakes, for various reasons. Achieving this will give meaning to your life. 

And what does resilience have to do with all this?

 Understood as resilience in the face of difficulties, the ability to withstand maximum tension and not break, spiritually speaking, it may be an expression of these transcendental values ​​that give meaning to life.

In summary, one could say:

1. “Need” is the biological and existential driving force (the “Being” and “Having”).

 2. “Value” is the light that qualifies the action (the “Being” and “Doing”).

 3. The **Situation** is the historical context that offers us certain satisfactions.

4. El “Meaning of life” is the conscious sum of chosen values ​​that allow you to cope with the needs and situations you have.

Educating and fostering degrees of freedom so that each person can discover the meaning of their life, that is, choose it and become aware of it, contributes to having healthy individuals. 

Developing and promoting a map of values ​​to sow and cultivate a new society through policies, plans and programs will allow us to have a common horizon. 

They will make him resilient with a sense of purpose in life. 

It will help you consider other alternative lifeworlds.

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." Friedrich Nietzsche, 1889.