Or, rather, there is no such thing as “need” in the sense that people commonly think they mean it.  I was taught very early, by some well-meaning but not very sophisticated grade-school teacher, the difference between “needs” and “wants;” that a need was something one had to have to live and everything else was a want, and it was an undisciplined child who conflated the two.  She was well-meaning, trying to instill in her students some moral humility, some recognition that most of what we think we must have, most of what we think we’ll die without, is actually just a “want.”  Her definition is wrong, though, and wrong in a way that has led to the neediness mania of today.

How do people use the word “need” now?  How do they mean it?  How they think they mean it is indicated by the way they use it:  “A person needs food;” “A man needs sex;” “She needs therapy;” “I have needs.”  They say it as if stating a law of the universe—Two bodies with mass need attract one another, and I need a drink—or they seem to be driving at something like a categorical imperative, a statement which is true in its own right, universal, and without predicate.  In other words, they say it as if that’s the whole statement.  “I need ______.”  The end, full stop, as if there’s nothing more to say on the subject, and certainly the statement does not need justification.  This is just a mental gimmick, though, a semantic trick they play on themselves.

What one always means, when one uses the formula, “I need x,” is “I need x in order to y.”  I need food, water, oxygen, and sleep… but only in order to continue living.  I don’t need to continue living, in any categorical sense.  It is not a law of the universe that I continue living.  At best it is someone’s preference, probably mine.  I need oxygen in order to continue living, but I only want to continue living.  One might argue that a man’s gratifying of his sexual appetites is necessary to a healthy and fulfilled life, but even if that were true, then the best one could say is that a man needs sex in order to have the happy and fulfilled life which he wants.  There is no requirement that he have a happy and fulfilled life.

(Of course, the prior statement, that a man needs to gratify his sexual urges in order to feel happy and fulfilled, has never actually been proven.  It has just been taken as “settled science” by people who really want to have sex.)

Every need, as enumerated by Man, is of this kind, a need which exists relative to a want.  People have Wants, and they need the prerequisites of those Wants in order to attain those Wants, but everything ultimately is dependent on Want.  An individual preference or desire, rather than some transcendental requirement.

You can see how we got where we are, though.  My teacher, for all her good intentions, created the semantic trick.  By labeling those things which we need in order to live as simply “Needs” and everything else as “Wants,” she created this notion of a Need in the sense of a categorical imperative.  A “Need,” full stop.  If it’s something you need in order to live, then it is something you Need, period.  Think about what that does to the mind of the person who uses it.  A Want, it is implied, is relative and can be questioned.  If I deny you your wants, it’s just tough love.  If I deny you your needs, though, it’s tantamount to murder.  Worse than murder.  I’m annihilating your personhood even while you still breathe.  Not only will you die soon, but even before you die I have taken away one of the critical elements of your personhood.  If you say, “I need x,” and just stop your mind there, without ever referring to or thinking about why you need it, what you want it for, and the value of your want, then you have primed your mind for the most vicious defenses should the supply of that Need ever be threatened.

Of course such a formulation is precious to the masses.  If you were always to state the need in the context of the want, then you would only be able to say, “I need food in order to continue living.”  This immediately begs, even in you, the speaker, another question: why do you want to continue living?  That question is an abyss over which most people totter in dread.  Entertain it but a moment, and one risks a headlong tumble down into a dark void where all the answers are intolerable.  What happens to the world if I die?  (Not much.)  What happens to me if I die?  (Either annihilation—in which case my death won’t matter even to me after it’s happened—or, worse, judgement—in which case I should probably be living my life differently.)  Is my life really so valuable, that this resource should be spent to prolong it?  (How many can say, asked to value their lives, that their lives have any value other than to themselves, and other than purely as the only alternative to being dead?  Which is not much.) Than to face all of this existential horror, it is much easier to end the sentence early—“I need x.”—and then kill the person who has x, because you must, because you Need x, existentially, categorically.  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the “argument,” such as it is, used to justify almost all human atrocity, and certainly all pillage, rape, and murder, and most war.  This little fallacy of Need.