Thesis;
Good is determined by the need. Without need, there can be no good. Need is the problem and good is what leads to the solution of the problem. Good is relative to actual need. And clarity of need is good for all.

Defining Good
In any endeavor, whatever is seen to lead to fulfilling the task without creating greater problems, is perceived as good. If cooking is the endeavor, whatever helps to get the cooking done, as long as it doesn’t take too much away from a different need, is accepted as good. If defending oneself against an attacker is the concern, strategies, weapons, and assistants are all seen as good. If cancer is the problem then whatever abates the cancer is accepted as good as long as it doesn’t also kill the patient.

The Need of Need
But one of the needs for life is to have need. If a person were to truly have no need at all, no need to eat, to breath, to move, or even to think he would stagnate and begin to corrupt. He would express no effort, no spirit. He would be dead. Such is the state of being dead. It is by responding to need, that life is living. Thus that which provides need, without causing more troubles, is also good. Too much peace is deadly and thus it is good to ensure the harmony of pursuit rather than the state of pure peace.

One might ask, “why can’t I just live for entertainment?”

Entertainment
The perception of entertainment is caused by first perceiving an association with a need. Eating is entertaining for many because eating is the good that serves the need of obtaining nourishment. Sex is often perceived as good because it serves the need for procreation. Competition is often perceived as good because it serves the need to strategize, persist, and achieve. If you are aware that you need a job, a list of available jobs is accepted as good because it leads to what is sought. But what happens when those needs are taken away?

Without actual need producing a perceived association to the good, activities that once served a need, no longer have a foundation for their association. They have lost their soul. Without a foundation anchoring their direction, they wonder. What is eaten begins to change and have no means to determine healthy versus unhealthy. The senses and perception must rely strictly on being triggered by the exact same perceived good as before when there was a need. The body and mind are not so concretely stable.

Thus being only with the need of entertainment leads to the loss of ability to discern healthy from unhealthy and eventually leads to confusion, corruption, and death. Such is the essential and philosophical cause of cancer. Being able to identify healthy from unhealthy is paramount to maintaining life so as to be entertained by and enjoy its pursuit.

Thus that which ensures that you have a need, gives you life and joy as well as direction for health and is therefore good.

Pseudo-needs and the Bad
The pursuit of entertainment can become a bad. Many associations to differing needs of health are made during life. These associations, if pursued strongly and passionately, can overwhelm the perspective of the actual need. This is referred to as a lust (from luster). The associated sub-goal becomes a pseudo-need. A pseudo-need is a perceived need that is not actually associated to health.

The stronger instincts are the most common initiators of pseudo-needs. Sexual pursuit is a very common example. The male often becomes so involved in the pursuit of sex that the sub-goal of having sex overshadows any perception of the actual need to procreate. Sexual interest is most often merely a pseudo-need providing entertainment and a sense of accomplishment even though no real accomplishment was made nor needed.

When a person becomes too involved with a pseudo-need pursuit, he takes away from the energy and effort that would have been available and placed toward actual need. This is when the entertainment becomes a bad because it increased the other problems associated with health, his true needs.

Drugs cause this same effect. Drugs trick the mind into sensing more good than was actually present. Through the lust to feel good, the drug becomes the pseudo-need. If the mind perceives the most good coming from the drug, it cannot discern actual need any longer. Health becomes irrelevant in making decisions. When he eats, what he eats, or even if he eats becomes too unimportant to be able to sense the subtleties involved in healthy hunger.

All strong passions have the potential to initiate pseudo-needs that blind the decision-making process and lead to ill health and death.

Too many entertaining distractions can cause a blindness to actual need as well even though no one of them was strongly pursued. This is similar to information overload in having too many decisions to be able to responsibly make a decision. The results are the same.

Thus strongly pursued entertainment or merely too much diversity of entertainment, although felt as joyful, is dangerous, “too much of a good thing”. Don’t merely increase, but optimize.

Clarity – Sight of the True Need
Anything that causes blindness to true need is unhealthy and thus a bad, regardless of perception and the joy of accepted pseudo-needs.

But if that which blinds is bad, then that which brings accurate sight is good. Clarification of your needs by your own behavior and choices is the good that abates addictions and cancer. Clarity brings health to the harmony of the joy in life and thus is a need in itself and a good.

One of life's essential needs is clarity regarding its needs. The pursuit of the clarity of ones needs is the pursuit of life.