This echoes Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which can be viewed as people intuitively focusing on longer and longer-term needs. The bottom of the hierarchy, food

This echoes Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which can be viewed as people intuitively focusing on longer and longer-term needs. The bottom of the hierarchy, food and water, if not fulfilled, will kill in a matter of days to weeks. Immediate physical safety follows, then social belonging, then higher-order psychological needs (love, esteem) that promote success over longer time scales. Note that these needs aren't necessarily competing, but are ultimately compatible: e.g. being in a position where you are loved and esteemed by your community will ensure that your lower-order needs are likely to be fulfilled indefinitely into the future. In this context, a 'will to power' makes a lot of sense. Your mind instinctually models that not only is it necessary to have your immediate needs today fulfilled, but that you have a guarantee that your immediate needs can be fulfilled in the future. And the best way to guarantee that is to have the personal ability to ensure that outcome, e.g. 'power' or 'capacity'. If you drag this discussion out a bit further, one can immediately see the limitations of a proposal like UBI, or the anger coming from largely right-leaning communities hit by downsides of globalization. You can promise people benefits (or tax transfers) and feed them today, but there is no psychological sense of safety. If you know that ultimately you play no useful economic role in your society, and are really living at the largesse of society of large, what guarantee is there that that state of affairs will continue indefinitely?