Not of things like food and water and shelter, though certainly a person can lack those, but of something more abstract and immaterial, felt by the needy and the prosperous alike, and which makes itself known as a sort of void, or interior chasm, which one can never adequately fill with the things of this world, even if the things in question are ‘wholesome’ or healthful.

Which puts me in mind of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who spoke of the human condition as one characterized primarily by ‘lack’.

As Saint Augustine wrote, in his Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”

Which is as it ought to be, insofar as to not feel that restlessness would suggest they are spiritually dead.

Because they will feel themselves to be continually restless.

The absence of which recognition people will sense, in their lives, even if they tell themselves they don’t believe in its necessity.

In other words, to things that have no spiritual grounding, that do not recognize man as a spiritual creature.

Because these causes now are almost always ‘materialist’, reducing the condition of man to his class, his race, his sexual orientation, his economic standing, his so-called ‘privilege’ or lack thereof — to anything but his own volition.

The problem is that these banners are waved over causes of such sophistry, and so often are intended to divide, that they can’t help but bring the people who gather under them, or adhere to them, to frustration and desolation, even if at first they give those people vitality and purpose.

Because most of them have been so discouraged by the absence of meaning in their lives that they’ve taken up the nearest or most obvious banners of righteousness, to compensate.

And yet they are not entirely to blame, the people who have subscribed to such an agenda, and who now advance it, at least not the majority of them, who by and large are well-intended, have suffered in some way, or have witnessed suffering, and have felt the proddings of their conscience, and have responded to those proddings; that is, they are not entirely responsible for the fact that they have allowed themselves to be persuaded by a worldview that is outwardly ‘compassionate’ while spiritually noxious, except insofar as they have become aware of its noxiousness, and have ignored it.

But it is, with rare exceptions, an astonishing self-indulgence, and one sign among many of a civilization in decline.

Of course, those who do so (who equivocate in this way) will have some ready retort, will say that they are not doing what I have said that they are doing, or will admit that they are doing it but that it is a good thing, a necessary thing, as if the millennia of thought and understanding that would seemingly contradict them is absent of the wisdom and perspicacity in which they are so abundant.

The significance of which is that no category is unquestionable; every category is, in theory, up for debate, or ‘interpretation’, and will depend for its validity on the ‘lived experience’ of the person who has decided to address themselves to it.

Which is to try to make of it no category at all.

My point being that we have arrived at a moment in history when perhaps the most fundamental category in nature is one about which many people will equivocate; will try to divest of its edges, or boundaries, and make fluid; and to invite into its domain (which had once been objective and ‘physical’) the subjective and the psychological.

Which is why I say it prevents ‘creativity’, strictly speaking. Reality requires of us the ability to negotiate our identities, which ability itself is collaborative, and thus creative. To refuse to acknowledge that people we meet will reach their own conclusions, about the categories into which we fit, based on their own impressions and cognitions (which in turn are based somewhat on how we ‘present’, but are not entirely within our control), is to deny those people their autonomy, and their creative function. It is also to regress to the mindset of a two year-old, who will throw a tantrum whenever he does not ‘get his way’.

Meaning that it — the ideology (if not the gesture) — wants for selfhood to become a tiny kingdom of ego, in which everything that was once noble and altruistic is discouraged, abstracted, and sent away, in favor of an outlook of perpetual grievance.

On the surface such a gesture seems harmless, even considerate. But there is, in the spirit of the ideology that occasions it, something like a denial of the negotiated self, in favor of a self that does not ‘condescend’ to negotiation, and instead enjoys absolute sovereignty over its own definition.

As when a physician, for example, observes the genitalia of a newly delivered infant, and is said to ‘assign’ the sex rather than ‘record’ it, based on what he or she observes.