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For the last few years I’ve referred to NEO as an experiment in musical utopia, but haven’t fully defined for myself what that means. We spend a fair bit of time examining the traditional hierarchies of classical music in an attempt to great a more egalitarian form of music making, which I suspect is part of the “utopia” vibe, and last year participants started calling NEO an anti-professional space, and speaks to a different kind of idealistic artist space. This year, part of the festival conversation was around the concept of self-actualization, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and art’s fraught relationship with capitalism. The conversation centered around the question: what happens if we invert the pyramid and place self-actualization as the fundamental basis for building our life? The question comes from this article by Teju Ravilochan, which charts Maslow’s own influence in creating his hierarchy of needs, which some research suggests may have been influenced by his time with the Blackfoot tribe.  I presented the outline of this idea as part of a broader suggestion to artists that we have to invest our time and resources into our work first, looking at the perennial question of ‘what is enough’ in our lives, in particular the material aspect of our lives, and once we’ve achieved enough putting our energy towards fulfilling those other needs. My thought was to reclaim the idea of the starving artist from a person who can’t make a living with their art to one who chooses to live simply so they can put their time, energy, and resources into what matters most. It seems simple enough, but humans are inherently wanting creatures and our sense of what is enough is always expanding. Maybe it’s in our nature to always want more, or maybe it’s because we fear scarcity and want to hoard what we can to secure our future. Probably it’s a bit of both. This desire for more doesn’t just apply to our material needs, it’s true for the other needs Maslow lists out as well. For artists, our sense of belonging and esteem can become an un-fillable hole, always seeking higher levels of prestigious association, bigger gigs, and greater renown. Seeking validation from others isn’t the only way we move the goal posts to our own sense of enoughness though. What could be the act of developing our creative voice as a way of unveiling our most authentic self, and as a step towards building a fully expressed and authentic community/culture, is too often subsumed by a mentality that our work is only valuable if it meets certain criteria. It needs to make enough money to meet our needs, or have a certain number of audience members, or be reviewed by a particular publication, and on and on. That’s capitalism baby! So, can we actually invert Maslow’s hierarchy and place our self-actualization as our priority and assume the rest will fall into place? Perhaps so, in a society that takes care of each other and considers the health of the whole over the desires or ambitions of individuals. Ravilochan shares this story from "Dana Arvis…when she asked Native communities in the Cheyenne River territory about poverty: “They told me they don’t have a word for poverty,” she said. “The closest thing that they had as an explanation for poverty was ‘to be without family.’” Which is basically unheard of.” This might imply that a capitalist environment, one where with an increasingly large wealth gap where those without are forced to focus on acquiring basic needs, makes self-actualization (especially through art) an opportunity for the privileged few. But here’s another perspective, one that comes from looking at impoverished societies who have placed the value of self-actualization at the center of their culture: self-actualization is a process that runs alongside fulfilling our other needs. It’s not a luxury that comes after everything else, it is a mentality we bring to every activity in our lives. Cynthia (psychotherapist extraordinaire and also my wife) says that anytime we try to create strict linear progressions like this, we run into trouble. The stages of grief, for instance, aren't experienced in a straight line, and the hierarchy of our needs is similar. In fact, Ravilochan includes the following caption as important context to the above image: “Because Maslow never himself depicted his hierarchy as a pyramid (Kaufman, 2019) and the Blackfoot did not draw their worldview on a tipi (Heavy Head, 2021), this diagram should not be read as an exact comparison or as capturing the nuances of both lenses. However, I have included it here to help those of us mired in Western thinking see the different emphasis of First Nations perspectives.” Instead, Ravilochan shares a circular model of needs based on the ideas of Terry Cross:  This is remarkably similar to a chart I have shared during NEO for years, which is a sort of mapping of the Japanese concept of Ikigai, which roughly translates to your purpose (another way of saying self actualization).  The circular nature of the Ikigai flower also resists the idea of a linear progression of needs, instead saying that we must find an expression of our life that satisfies all of these aspects as part of the process of self-actualization.
I’ve come to realize that I see the NEO Festival as an experiment in utopia because it's a space where we focus on Self and Community Actualization as the primary goals of our work and explore how we might bring that kind of focus into the music world as a whole. Every year I go through this set of topics, I hear feedback from folks that they’d love to hear more about the practical logistics of actually making money with music, and I get it. Maybe your needs aren’t being met and music is all you’ve got to rely on, but what if, along the way, we put our energy into the human aspect of being an artist, how it feeds us and others, how it connects and builds bridges from meaning, how it not just fulfills but makes manifest the realist parts of our humanity, and then understand that all of the above is a practice we can bring to everything we do, we might just find we aren't making art, we're making a world.
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