The response of workers to domination and consequent loss of dignity, can be seen as a profoundly normal biologically rooted self-protection, and therefore can be seen itself as a symptom of human dignity. This comes out at the other end of the horn finally from the way in which most people today will see these responses of the outraged worker who is being stepped upon and who is defending himself, precisely as evidence of how low human nature is, how little it can be trusted, how worthless people are, how little they amount to. It is precisely these reactions which I can see as respectworthy which make other people lose all their respect for the worker.

The fact that slaves will revolt if not openly then covertly makes ME proud of the human species; but I can understand quite well that it would make a slave owner or an exploiter or a dominator get very angry and contemptuous. I have seen this happen often in the individual clinical situation: The Exploiter comes to take for granted the exploitee almost as a kind of character. This is very subtle and very hard to say, but it’s also quite real. The wolf expects that the lamb will continue to behave like a lamb. If suddenly the lamb turns around and bites the wolf, then I can understand that the wolf would get not only surprised but also get very indignant. Lambs aren’t supposed to behave that way. Lambs must lie quietly and get eaten up. Just so I have seen human wolves get very angry when their victims finally turn around and strike back.

For instance, this is a fairly common reaction in exploitative women who marry themselves a kind of an ox whom thereafter they treat with domination and contempt and so on and whom they regard as servant or slave, while they regard themselves as queens. But the delicate point here is that somehow they come to regard their queenly status as deserved, as an edict of nature somehow, and they feel somehow that it is quite just, that they should have a personal male servant who goes to work and who sweats and slaves and so on in order to give them comforts and luxuries. Such a woman ordinarily gets extremely angry, very indignant, very surprised when the ox type of husband revolts at having his blood sucked and makes some kind of retaliation whether overtly by punching her in the nose, or as is much more usual, covertly by secretly taking up with another woman.

Or another example that I have observed and which is usable in this situation is the very frequent conversation that one is apt to hear among older ladies who are wealthy and who always have been wealthy. The standard topic of conversation is how good the servants used to be and how bad they are now. Throughout this kind of conversation I have never detected the slightest doubt that God made it this way, i.e., that these ladies assumed that it was absolutely just that they should be ladies and that servants should be servants. They never doubted for a moment that loyalty to the master in the servant was a very desirable and just and fair thing. Their indignation when the servants have an opportunity to become unexploited, to give up being slavish, is the kind of indignation I have spoken of above that the queenly wife might show when suddenly the slave of a husband revolted. "This is not right, this is not becoming," they might say. "This is very ugly and dirty and very depressing. People shouldn’t be that way."    What all these people are describing is really the good and well-adjustedslave who likes being a slave and is very well adjusted and adapted tothat situation, and whose hostility has either disappeared or has been repressed so profoundly that there is just no surface indication of it anymore at all. But in a democratic society this is exactly the kind of person who should make us depressed instead of glad; this is the kind of person who is an argument AGAINST the higher possibilities of human nature, of creativeness, of growth, or self-actualization. Just in the same way as a neurosis can be seen either as a sign of sin and evil and human weakness and degradation on the one hand, or can be seen with deeper understanding and insight, as a frightened person’s indirect struggle toward health, growth, and self-actualization, just so is the whole of the foregoing applicable to the response of the worker in a bad industrial situation. He may show his anger at being dehumanized in all sorts of sneaky ways, but these are essentially testimonials to his fear rather than to his lack of growth possibilities. The hostility shows that he wants to grow out of that situation. Or to say this in another way, the response of outrage when dignity is attacked is itself a validation of the human being’s need for dignity. The research questions then are: "How can we avoid the industrial situations which cut human dignity and make it less possible? In those situations which are unavoidable in industry, as with assembly lines, how can we decontaminate these so as to retain the dignity of the worker and his self-esteem as much as possible in spite of the circumstances?"

EUPSYCHIAN MANAGEMENT: A JOURNAL

by

Abraham H. Maslow

Brandeis University

1965 Homewood, Illinois

Richard D. Irwin, Inc. and The Dorsey Press

Library of Congress Catalog No. 65-27843