I woke up this morning trying to give Congress the benefit of the doubt.
Running for Senate, you keep hitting the same walls. Programs that would save lives and cost less money. Plans that experts recommended decades ago. Solutions sitting in reports no one implemented. After a while, it eats at you. You start thinking these people are cowards. Uncaring. The kind of people who could be sent away from town and nobody would miss them.
But maybe I was being unfair. Maybe the foundation was off. Maybe they started with bad information and everything downstream just followed. They are not heartless - they are misinformed.
So I went looking.
Somewhere in the federal government, there had to be a foundational study on what human beings actually need. HHS, the security services, the Library of Congress - someone must have commissioned a report. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has been around for fifty years. Dozens of researchers have built on it since. Congress has funded studies on the sex life of gay seagulls. Go look it up. So surely the foundational document on human needs must be extensive, done by highly accredited people, available to every legislator writing policy that affects 330 million lives.
It does not exist.
They never looked.
No congressional study on what drives human beings. No federal report synthesizing the academic research on fundamental needs. Nothing connecting Maslow to Max-Neef to McClelland to modern developmental psychology. The people writing housing bills have never asked what shelter means to human wellbeing. The people writing healthcare policy have never studied what healing requires beyond the physical. The people designing safety net programs have never examined what it takes for a human being to thrive.
They have been assembling furniture without opening the box.
Then they stand back, look at the wobbly mess, and commission a forty million dollar study on why shelves keep falling. The screws were in the bag. The bag was in the box. They never looked.
When they finish, they hold out the box and brag about how much spare hardware they have left over. That is the 1.7% implementation rate - all those expert recommendations still in the plastic bag. They do not know those parts were load-bearing. They do not know that bracket was supposed to connect housing policy to job training, that bolt was supposed to anchor mental health services to the foster care system.
And when the whole unit collapses on someone’s kid, they commission another study.
I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to believe the foundation was just off, that they were working from bad information. But the truth is worse. There is no foundation. They never built one. They have been winging it for decades, measuring failure rates on a machine they never bothered to understand.
The instructions were right there. The parts were in the box. They just never opened it.
They study what is broken. I study what humans need. That is the difference.
Tim L. Harris is an Independent candidate for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire. Author of nine books on human motivation including the AVATAR Series, he has spent four decades studying what drives human beings and helping people find alignment. International trade delegate across 88 countries. UN speaker. Twenty-five years in New Hampshire business.
HARRIS4SENATE.COM
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