Mazlow and elite self affirmation

I studied Mazlow in college and thought him a clever chap.  He put forth one of the most influential social theories of th last century.  Megan McCardle points out that for all it's brilliance Mazlow's Hierarchy of Needs was nothing more than self affirming poppycock.  Key points:

Maslow did what Kolhberg did in his theory of moral development and Rollo May and all the existentialist psychiatrists did in their theories: He asserted that the objectively highest state of human development was to be like him and like people he admired.

Maslow admired many people I admire, Abraham Lincoln for example. But he and I can't admire Lincoln through some objective lens as psychologists or scientists. We can only say we admire Lincoln with the same level of objectivity that someone else might admire Jefferson Davis. Maslow wanted to give an objective validation that, for example, the Viet Nam war protestor was objectively superior to the Viet Nam general, the environmentalist was objectively superior to the captain of industry etc. Many cultural elites ate it up, just as Soviet elites ate it up when their psychiatrists said that anyone who didn't love the government was mentally ill and needed electroshock treatment post-haste.

Psychologists and social scientists generally still venture repeatedly today into the territory of human values and attempt to claim the ability to make objective judgments about which are the most healthy or scientifically validated. They don't ever seem to learn that they are often just trying to rationalize cultural fashions: In the 1940s the "mentally healthy" person was one who respected tradition, but he morphed into the to-be-pitied "organization man" in the 1950s. Psychologists valorized divorce as the "mentally healthy choice" for those who were not "growing" in the 1970s, whereas today they tend to say that it's better to stick it out and stop complaining so much.

In his Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy triad Douglas Adams describes a fiendish device called the "Total Perspective Vortex" in which the the entire scope of the universe is projected from a piece of stale fairy cake into the victim's brain. The victim then is shown precisely where in this enormity he stands blowing his mind and turning him into a gibbering idiot. And demonstrating conclusively that the one thing that a person can not afford to have is a sense of proportion.

Only one man ever survived the total perspective vortex: Zaphod Beeblebrox: the three armed two headed ex head honcho of the Galaxy. Why? Because he was put in a vortex that was designed to show that he, the big Beeb, was the absolutely most important thing in it.

Intellectuals, having capacious minds don't need machines to do this. They can create entire universes of imagination in which they (naturally) place themselves at the center. Of course, by the by these minds die. Which would seem to be a big drawback.

Fairy cake anyone?