The drivers of human behaviour

Any individual has four basic psycho-social needs that drive his or her behaviour.  They are the countervailing pairings of Control and Love, and Curiosity and Faith. 

The need to Control or own is ameliorated by the need to belong (Love) - selfishness against selflessness.  

The need to know (Curiosity) is countervailed by the need to transcend (Faith) - understanding against believing. 

The common root of these four psycho-social needs is the instinct, the overwhelming imperative, of personal survival.  In the aggregate the four psycho-social needs translate into the four principal motive forces that have shaped the history of society over the millennia, and that will continue to shape our collective future. 

The history of society is certainly not solely or even principally the history of the battles between economic classes.  The view, popularly ascribed to Marx, that the social and political conditions of a society are largely determined by its economic basis of production, is an exceedingly narrow one. 

People are much more than economic entities, than members of one or other contending economic class.  In fact, they are not even primarily economic beings.  And, in the final analysis, people are not rational. 

At the most elemental level our behavioural drivers are our inescapable biological needs: the need for sustenance (air, water, and food), the need for physical protection (from the elements and predators), the need for sleep, and the need for sex.  Satisfaction of these needs is only ever temporary, and can only be deferred for a short time, usually less than twenty four hours. 

These fundamental biological needs drive our daily behaviour and set our routines.  They ensured that human societies would develop above but near water, and generally in temperate or tropical regions, and would take on a marked diurnal cycle. 

We share these fundamental biological needs with any animal species.  Had they been the sum-total of our needs we would not have developed beyond the existential level of a flock of sheep.

The needs that have driven human society to develop to its present level of sophistication, and that determine its broader, longer cycles are not biological needs but our psycho-social needs - Control and Love, and Curiosity and Faith.

The two countervailing pairings are rarely in balance either within any one individual or within society as a whole.  At any one time, or during any given period, it is likely that one element in each pair will be in ascendancy.  Combinations of pair elements succeed each other in a pattern of cycles within cycles^[1].  This may be visualised as two see-saws with a common fulcrum, going up and down at different rates so that at any one time either end of one see-saw may be up with either end of the other see-saw.   Four quadrants may also be used to depict the possible combinations of dominant pair elements.  This depiction could mistakenly be interpreted as indicating that only two drivers are present at any point in time – that is not so.  For example in the LF (Love/Faith) quadrant while Love and Faith are dominant, Curiosity and Control could still be significant drivers and will almost always be present in some measure. 

For our long term hopeful survival^[2] we need more Love and Faith^[3].