-You're a brilliant student. Do you want to continue studying when you finish school? high school diploma? -I just don't feel like it. We live in a society in which what we feel like and what we don't feel like often guides our lives. We let occasional sensations and emotions "decide" for us. For some people the rule to do or not to do something is simply that it appeals or does not appeal. They do not consider whether it is good or bad, opportune or inopportune, sensible or unwise. The appetite would be an end in itself.

To desire is to wish for something; to will, on the other hand, is something quite different. I am referring to the will of the will. To desire is to pretend something in a passing way, without continuity; on the other hand, to will is determination, purpose firm, resolution to achieve something and to give oneself to that task.

Voluntary behavior is directed by reasons, it is reflexive, it chooses to act in one way or another. On the other hand, behavior based on appetite and desire is unreflective. The will is distorted when the voluntary act is replaced by desire.

The human species, unlike what happens in other biological species, does not set fixed and innate patterns of behavior for its members, but offers space for self-determination for each one of them. To want, strictly speaking, is not a simple desire. It is not enough to know something to want it. Willing is not an automatism. I can want something whether I like it or not. A person affected by the "I don't feel like it" syndrome, if he has no external obligation that pushes him to activate himself, will do less and less things and less willingly. What can we expect from a family or from a business where each member tends to do only what he feels like doing? If each person postpones duty for whim, both the coexistence and the government of these institutions will be impossible.

The root of the problem is that at present the will is hardly educated. Among the factors that seem to influence the decline of the Education of the will is the permissiveness educational and an emotional culture that privileges feeling over reason and will.

The Education of the will implies exigency, effort and self-control. Willpower is developed by facing difficulties on one's own. But it is not enough to have willpower; it is necessary that it be a good will, oriented to the good. Al Capone and Teresa of Calcutta had a lot of willpower; the former used it to lead a gang of criminals who became rich by trafficking illegal substances. The latter oriented it to self-sacrificing and disinterested service to the poorest of the poor.