Value
On the bottom, are the most important needs and on the top are less important needs. Physiological needs are basic necessities such as food and drink. Compared to them, the other needs are insignificant, because physiological needs are required for survival, while other so called ‘ needs ’ are extra. Safety needs are also very important, but not as important as physiological needs. Safety needs are security and protection from danger. This leads to
a natural desire for an orderly world and certainty that nothing will go wrong. As you go higher in the pyramid, the desire increases. This is because for most people in western society, the lower needs are fulfilled, but the higher needs are only partially fulfilled. The higher needs are linked to your spiritual values. Naturally, we desire more for these needs, because we want to be happy, so we buy experiences that make us happy and fulfil those upper needs. Businesses take advantage of our desire for happiness and use it to sell us things which are not essential for our survival, but which we can enjoy. With happiness comes belonging, esteem and self-actualization. This is how businesses gain customer loyalty. Businesses that can fulfil higher needs are irreplaceable in the customer’s mind, and therefore those businesses can influence the customer’s mind more. Customer loyalty is about getting your customer to believe and tell the world that your brand had no equal. Next, I will write about other interpretations of the word ‘ value ’ . We can say that a life is valuable if it has good ethics and knowledge. Ethics is about good vs bad, right vs wrong and just or unjust. Ethics is very difficult to measure, because something could be good or bad, depending at how you look at it. It can also be difficult tomeasure at what extent is something good or bad. Measuring value inmoney, on the other hand, is much easier to count. Knowledge is about what we know; and our knowledge is very limited for two reasons. Firstly, the physical universe could be an illusion. Perhaps, I’m just imagining the universe we live in, but at least I know that it exists in my mind. Secondly, even if the physical universe really does exist outside of my mind, we know almost nothing about it. We don’t even know for certain if there ismore than the observable universe, although that is very likely.We also don’t know much about darkmatter and dark energy. Thismeans that, if wemeasure value by knowledge, our value would be infinitely small, and so cannot be measured. Also, scientific theories could be observed to be wrong, so we don’t know if any scientific theories can be proven right and so we haven’t made any progress with scientific knowledge. This means that if we measure value by knowledge, our value is 0, but it can’t be, because ‘ cogito ergo sum ’ (Descartes), meaning that our value must be greater than 0. We can also talk about aesthetic value, which is based on the physical appearance of something rather than how practical that object is. This is difficult to measure, because there are multiple viewpoints. One person might think that an artwork is beautiful, while another may not see any beauty in the artwork. These other views of value can be used to measure relative value but cannot be measured absolutely.
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