Refugee situations illustrate the need hierarchy in action. It is not hard for Western relief efforts to provide standards of living so far beyond those normally found in some parts of the world that refugees are actually discouraged from returning home. In a perverse way, the emergence of human cantankerousness in disasters and refugee situations is a good sign. It means that people are sufficiently confident of survival that they can begin worrying about comfort and self-esteem again. It means the life-threatening crisis is largely over.
Technology is the key to satisfying the first two levels.
It doesn't take much technology to assure survival under reasonably benign conditions, or even quite harsh ones - the Inuit figured out how to survive in the Arctic thousands of years ago. Comfort takes a bit longer, although American society is already in some ways too comfortable for its own good and even the worst American slum offers amenities like electricity, indoor sanitation and running water that would have been considered fabulous luxuries by the standards of ages past. Indeed, having visited several places that have catapulted from severe poverty to relative affluence in a single human lifetime, it is hard in such settings to see technology as anything but an unmixed blessing. It's when technology is applied to the quest for self-esteem that many of the real problems associated with technology arise. The quest for self-esteem often expresses itself in a drive for power, control, or supremacy over others, often with technology used as the implement for attaining it.