The first subsistence level is of little concern to the business or industrial manager. It is the level at which man’s energies are consumed in the process of staying alive, in maintaining at least a balance between anabolic and catabolic processes. Man’s state of existence is more animalistic than human and his ethics at this level, like all ethics are hypothesized to reflect his state of existence, a state of existence in which he is aware of little more than the problems of sustenance, illness, reproduction and disputes. His question of right is: What ought I do to stay alive? His question of wrong:

What did I do that was so bad that it threatened my bodily existence? Thus, his rules of proper behavior pertain to warding off illness, assuring sustenance, controlling reproduction and settling disputes. In its entirety this ethic varies from pre-totemic propitiation for food, for protection from disease and for control of reproduction to complex totem and taboo.

Productive effort is limited to making simple, close to nature tools for digging and hunting, a few simple utensils primarily for use with domesticated fire and limited ceremonial objects. Business and industry does not exist at this level and there is little one can call commerce other than an occasional barter of things like ceremonial objects. Thus, understanding this level, though important to organizations like the Peace Corps and those being developed to fight poverty, is not crucial for the business or industrial manager. People at this level respond only to Nurturant Management but even if nurtured properly, they cannot respond in the manner we refer to as productive effort. He at this level can only be nurtured, much as one cares for an infant, and only in the hope that such nurturance will eventually lead to a higher level of human existence; a level of existence where activity beyond that needed for bare satisfaction of physiological needs is possible. But how does this movement take place?

Man moves from one level of existence to another when three things happen:

1. When for some reason an excess of energy over and above that necessary to solve the existential problems of the current level appears within the system.
    
2. When the increased brain activation resulting from the increased energy leads to the development and/or to the utilization of certain insights, which are necessary for movement to the next level of existence.
    
3. When some impelling reason for change develops.

When this change occurs, which is more like the opening of the bud of a rose than all or none affair, man’s state of existence changes and his total psychology changes also. Like the bud of the rose, man at the first level is a tightly bound system whose totality is yet to be. All that is to be in man or rose is present but not seen and this, all that is there, may never come to be. As one may never know the full beauty and fragrance of the rose, so too, may one never know the full flavor of human behavior. In the second stage of man, as in the second stage of the unfurling rose when the first layer of petals open, we get our first glimpse, albeit distorted, of all that can be. Each petal of the rose is a subsystem within the larger system of the layer. And the layer is a somewhat larger system, within the still larger system of the rose. And so it is hypothesized to be with man.

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