Our Most Basic Desires

What are our most basic desires? One list is survival, enjoyment, and group membership.

This is probably a question for psychology, but psychologists do not seem to have reached a consensus on this point. Some favor a few basic human drives. Others have a longer list. Maybe there is no universal list or hierarchy that applies to all human brings. Still we may be able to justify a few common desires as basic for most people.

Some candidates that have been proposed as basic desires include the desires for sex, power, respect, identity, parenthood, meaning, and transcendence.

The desire for sex is tied to the idea that the most important thing is for genetic material to be passed on. This transcends individual survival. If the genes survive and inspire behavior that disperses them widely enough so that they continue to survive, then it doesn't matter how long the individual lives. They just need to live long enough to pass on the genes. One problem is that babies thus produced need to be raised. At least someone has to be around long enough to see the babies to their reproductive years. So the parents do need to live a little longer. Also, this flies in the face of a common respect and love we have for our elders. In evolutionary terms maybe this could be explained by the need to pass on the body of cultural lore that the group needs to survive. But in any case, it seems that a society that was totally driven by sex would not long survive. And one thing we do know is that many human societies have survived, at least up to this point. At the same time, a society that does not reproduce itself will be gone in one generation, so the sex drive is important.

Another variation on sex as a basic desire is that many of our other desires can be interpreted in terms of sex. So if a person is tortured by unfulfilled sexual desire, they may go on to build bridges, write poems, or conquer countries when what they really wanted was a good sex life. Somehow this basic sex drive has been diverted into other things.

I suppose this is a matter for empirical research to resolve if it can. For now it seems simpler to just recognize that we do have a strong sex drive. It is very important. It can be a very pleasant pastime. It ties parents together, which is better for child rearing. It sometimes does get diverted into seemingly unrelated themes of self-esteem and power, but there is no need to universalize all desires into an expression of sexual desire. And sexual desire can be explained by the need for the species to reproduce itself, plain and simple. All its other allures may be just there to make that happen.

Another favorite basic desire is power. The more powerful are better able to pass on their genes and so the drive continues. The powerful just use moral standards to control the weak. But in a sense the powerful are dependent on the weak. Could we have a society in which all are strong? And in terms of numbers, there are more of the weak that succeed in reproducing than the strong. While the strong were out there defending their territory the weak were at home having babies. Society as a whole may need some of its members to have a drive for power, but it doesn't seem like everyone has it or needs to have it.

A general theme is starting to show itself. We survive together. We are social. Even the strong need the weak. None of us can survive on our own. If we want to survive individually we need to survive as a group. So people who can work together in groups are the ones who have survived. And to work together in groups we need some standards of human conduct. At the same time, there needs to be some outlet for the individual. They cannot be totally assimilated. This is why I have listed survival, enjoyment, and group membership as basic desires. While not everyone would agree to these being the most basic, still most people would likely agree that most people desire to survive, to have some enjoyments in their lives, and to be a member of a social group.

Respect, identity, and parenthood also seem to fit well into this theme. They each in some way are involved in our desire for group membership and the needs of the group to survive. Meaning and transcendence, however, seem to go beyond these issues. There is something in us that, even after all our physical and social needs have been met, still aches. We still want some answers on why we are here and where we are going. While these can be tied to ethical standards, they are more related to other issues that will be addressed later in this book, so I will hold them until then.