The thwarting of fundamental human needs

One of the most basic and enduring universals of humanness is the need to belong. A search for belongingness is a powerful human motivation and a basic requirement of all members of our species. Allen and colleagues have defined a sense of belonging as ‘the subjective feeling of deep connection with social groups, physical places, and individual and collective experiences – is a fundamental human need that predicts numerous mental, physical, social, economic, and behavioural outcomes’ ( Allen et al., 2021 ). Everybody knows this implicitly, but our institutions are not built to assure these ‘deep connections’ and, on the contrary, tend to divide, segregate, marginalise or exclude those who are non-compliant or ambivalent.