21. Committing to Your Hunger

Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a living world

How does an animal find food? By committing to their hunger—unlike humans, who often second-guess ourselves about our hungers. There’s an old idea in Western culture that animals are innately violent and possessed by their appetites while humans operate by rationality instead. We look at the ancient source of this idea: a poem by Greek poet-farmer Hesiod around 700 BCE. But oops—Hesiod was confused! He mashed up “how animals eat” with “how humans settle disputes,” setting up a mistaken idea of the predator-prey relationship that carries down to our day—we still talk of dogs and cats as “enemies.” In fact, we have a lot to learn from animals and their appetites: (1) by identifying what they’re truly hungry for, they contribute their niche to the ecocommunity; (2) when they are full they stop eating, unlike capitalism, which goads people into reaching past “enough” to “more than enough” (profit); and (3) they take delight in the hunt—a model for a world beyond capitalism, where humans do not work for others’ profit but instead engage in work that satisfies our souls as well as bodies. We need, in other words, to become more like hungry beasts.

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