Some people need things they know how to ask for.

Some people are meant to give the things for which they are asked.

Those are the lucky people.

Others need things and they do not know how to ask for. It is not that they do not know how to ask for things in general; it is that they cannot locate, objectify and speak about their need. A common response is to ask for things that can be asked for and to hope satisfaction happens.

Others need to give things nobody would ask for, that nobody recognizes they need, and sometimes even reject. These people are not generally considered useless; it is that they have a purpose no other person could ever assign them. The function they are asked to provide, as valued as it might be, is felt by the one providing it to be incidental. The common response to this condition is either a refusal to associate with those in the habit of assigning purposes, or to submit to the demands of the world and to coat meaning with insulating doubts. In other words a person withdraws from meaninglessness, or he internalizes meaninglessness and becomes a cynic or nihilist.

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Responsibility is only responsible when it acts with judgment and judges in order to act.

Responsibility must respond. It cannot refuse to respond.

However, responsibility cannot simply obey.

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When a need speaks, it often speaks the truth of its general existence with false specifics.

(Why? A determined need is uncomfortable. An indeterminate need is horrifying. Need finds relief even in false determinations.)

The need does its best to express its substance, but often it can only manage to indicate the fact of its existence.

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A patient who feels ill misdiagnose his ailment, but that doesn’t mean he is wrong that he feels ill. A doctor who treats his patients according to their self-diagnoses is a bad doctor. So is the doctor who refuses to treat his patients on the basis that they have misdiagnosed themselves.

A parent who dismisses a child’s distress because the child is wrong about its source is as bad as a parent who indulges the child’s demands. Spoiling a child comes not from giving the child what she needs, but from failure to exercise parental judgment before acting on the child’s need.

The same is true, but more ambiguously, between employer and employee, between husband and wife, between citizen and nation, between parishioner and parish.