I stumbled upon a line when reading the other day that got me thinking.
“Error is not just an absence, but a deprivation -— the lack of knowledge that somehow ought to be in me."1
Whether error is an absence or privation isn’t important to me at the moment, but how well this line highlights the difference between absence and deprivation.
To illustrate the difference, if I say, “Mary had a little….” there is only one word that ought to go there, and probably only one word that you can think of when it’s spoken. “Lamb” is what goes in the line. Take that one word out, and the poem is deprived of the word that ought to be in its place. Thousands of words are absent from this line, but there is no deprivation caused by these other words' absences. Words like car, doll, toy, brother, bird, etc. all are absent from this line, but the line is fine as it is, so long as it isn’t deprived of the words and order that makes it what it is.
Deprivation presupposes an interdependent relation of things towards a purpose or goal. It is not just absence, but a felt absence. The absent thing or person changes the meaning or pattern so negatively as to diminish or distort it. And the memory of a once pure or complete situation contrasted with the reduced one hurts.
Hypocrisy is a symptom of a deprivation. The fig tree in blossom that ought to be bearing fruit but has none, the pious church-goer who disdains the poor, a Porsche Carerra with no gas — the jarring difference between what we find and what we expect based creates a bitter resentment.
Since deprivation involves the idea of purpose to make it more felt than just absence, what happens if we’re deprived of our purpose?2 Would that not precede greater deprivation? In other words, when we don’t understand our purpose or have an idea of what our end is, we won’t know what we need to achieve it. Meanwhile, our wants are ever persistent and now, without knowledge to bridle and guide them, our sense of entitlements balloons out, ever increasing our sense of what ought to be for us.
If this last point is true, how then, with this ever mushrooming sense of entitlements can such a person hope to avoid all the deprivations and all the suffering that come along with it? As I said earlier, we only feel the suffering of deprivation if something is missing that ought to be there. Now that our oughts are huge, we have a thousand-fold increased our surface area for suffering. Perhaps this is the curse of our time: To have more and suffer for it.
One way out is the practice of avoiding attachment. An ascetic life, such as a monk or a nun, does this to avoid attachment to worldly things so they can focus on their higher calling. I don’t think we all can or should become monks but perhaps we can emulate with a portion of their devotion the honest searching for what matters most. Resist mere minimalism. Minimizing the wrong things can kill you.
We can suffer more than necessary by becoming attached to things – material things, parties, the news, others lives – things outside our control or influence. Things that might let us down, break down, or never even know we were there. They beckon for our attention but never return it back to us.
When we feel deprived of something, perhaps its worth asking ourselves if we should feel deprived of it, or just accept its absence. Did the thing contribute to a larger sense of our human purpose – to be social, to think, speak, act rationally in accordance with virtue? How needed is it really? When we can let go of something, we also let go of its ability to cause us strain.
We need some clarity about our ends in the beginning. With a solid grasp of that, possessing our purpose, everything else might be taken away, even our own lives, and we would not be deprived, having attained what we ought.