Unified Theory: Motivation

What motives people?
The needs for achievement, affiliation and power. So says David McClelland in his Theory of Needs, now a classic of psychology and management.

The needs for achievement and/or power can be seen as principle drivers of organizations and societies towards increasing consumption of resources (natural, human and time) and increasingly sophisticated and complex undertakings.  Over history feudalism, mercantilism and capitalism have been increasingly successful in mobilizing resources in support of the economic growth of individuals and societies.

Observers of nature or organizations often cite a governing principle of "grow or die".  Ecologists in the past decades have largely discredited the notion that the nature remains in self-correcting stasis.  Applied to nation states' search for dominance, well-reasoned arguments for similar processes can be made.

Individuals or groups that pursue achievement and/or power eventually dominate the outcomes of those that pursue affiliation. (And they often divert the goals of the affiliation-minded to serve their own goals.  Think here of advertising and politics.)

We find these principles everywhere we look: boardroom, sports, dating, in cities or in tribes.

But not in the Kogi people.

And that's precisely what stopped me dead in my tracks.

The 60,000 descendants of the isolated Tairona people, of which the Kogi are a part, are motivated by affiliation.  And they have been living steadily, pretty much in that state* for about 1,000 years.  They are different.

It is not their spiritual beliefs to which I refer, it's their societal devotion to a goal that is not based on growth.  This devotion to something other than growth (power, achievement) is, to me, the big deal.

To be clear, we're not talking about a short-lived new age commune.  1,000 years is a pretty good track record of survival.
The Kogi and the other Tairona groups are sustainable.


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*I don't know the details of every year of their history, but as a broad stroke, it's probably safe to say.  Placeholder until I understand Tairona history better.  Draft comment only.