Examples Of Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs In 1984 By George Orwell

In the novel 1984, author George Orwell comments on the ways in which totalitarian governments foster the dependence of the people through the manipulation of maslow’s hierarchy of needs. According to psychologist Abraham Maslow, there are multiple levels of human necessities required to achieve “self-actualization”. If a person is deprived of a basic need, that person cannot continue on to the next level of development. In 1984, Big Brother uses their control of these principles of human motivation to ensure the loyalty and compliance of the Party.
According to the third tier of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, all human beings need a sense of love and belonging. Big Brother fulfills this basic need by removing interpersonal relationships - romantic,

religious, and familial connections specifically - from the lives of the Party members. By doing this, Big Brother is then able to redirect this need, causing them to be the sole recipient of the emotions that are involved with the removed connections.
Big Brothers “real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act… Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation” (Orwell, 67).

By removing the stimulus of sex, the Party members are then given more opportunities to devote their loyalties to Big Brother. This influence is made evident in Winston’s reactions to Julia. Her “white and smooth” body “aroused no desire in him” (32). The Party has trained its members to become unresponsive to romantic feeling. The stigma of sex has been altered to such a degree by the Party that Winston views sex as an almost political act since it has become so closely related to Big Brother. In order to ensure true devotion to the Party, romantic connections are forbidden because becoming involved in such a relationship would mean devotion to another person other than Big Brother, and is therefore considered a threat to the Party’s power. Despite Winston’s relationship with Julia, he ultimately abandons his ties to her over his ‘love’ of Big Brother - thus his connection with Big Brother replaces his romantic

interest.
Big Brother’s desire to control and repurpose all forms of love to be directed towards it’s cause extends also to family relationships.

The dynamic of a typical Oceanian family is seen in the Parson’s children, who display no affection towards their parents. The children participate in activities condoning the mentality of the Party, such as watching the public executions of Thought Criminals and dressing up as spies, which, according to Winston is “not altogether a game” (24-25), which is seen when Parsons daughter eventually turns him in as a Thought Criminal. Instead of being a connection that nurtured family relationships, children born into the party have no learned loyalties to their parents, but instead have devotion to the Party. Orwell states that the purpose of a family ‘system’ “had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police” (136). In Big Brothers mission to eliminate all sense of love from the mentality of the Party members, the family is no longer a source of interpersonal love, but instead its purpose is to further enhance the Party’s

agenda.
After eliminating the stimulus from romantic and familial love, the Party then moves to the destruction of outside religious devotion. To do this, the Party intercepts any desire for religious conviction and promptly redirects all sense of religious desires onto Big Brother - thus creating the association of Big Brother as being a religious figure. After the Two Minute Hate, the appearance of Big Brother’s face causes a woman to call out “‘My Savior!’ she extended her arms towards the screen…. it was apparent that she was in prayer” (Orwell, 16). If a different source of a religious worship was accepted in this society, then Big Brother would no longer be the highest power, therefore presenting religion as a threat to the Party’s dominion.
By removing interpersonal relationships in Party members through the manipulation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Big Brother fosters a greater dependence on its followers. The emotions of loyalty that were once occupied by the basic need for the sense of love and belonging are now able to be re-associated with unwavering subscription to Big Brother and all of its missions. This redirection of emotional dependence creates room for its doctrine to grow in the beings of each member, leaving the personal identity of an individual lost - thus becoming an entity of the party. George Orwell has shows his readers that when governments similar to Big Brother feed off of the romantic, familial, and religious emotional drives of its submissives, the individual disappears.