Civilization is founded upon CIVILITY. Civility is founded upon basic human needs of food, shelter, and clothing. Ethics, manners, etiquette, these are all dependent on the basic human needs being fulfilled. If they are not fulfilled then we quickly go from humans to animals.
Every living being has the right to live and pursue life, this is why civilizations have definitions of self-defense. Animals can fight to the death especially because their sustenance depends on the food chain. For humans, we have consciousness and as a byproduct we have free will.
Free will is important but nobody has the right to take away another person’s life and everyone has the right to defend themselves. Just as we have the right to defend our life, we also must be responsible for our life and that means we have to get our food, shelter, clothing taken care of ourselves. Unless we are children, old, disabled, or otherwise lacking in ability, we must be self-reliant instead of relying on others.
In historical depictions of famine there is no civility. People resort to fighting, stealing, and even cannibalism. The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse also features the black rider of famine, it literally is one of the factors of the apocalypse. In famine civilizations break down.
Why would that be? Probably because the right to self defense and the right to pursue life conflict with one another. When there is limited food and other people’s pursuit of their lifeline is equivalent to theft of my lifeline, what other option is there but to fight?
I haven’t experienced famine. But that’s because my parents and grandparents did. The tremendous amount of physical and psychological suffering that famine brings warps your life experience and karma so you never, ever repeat it again. This is why as a child of immigrants I have all these food habits that seem ridiculous in 2025.
My father can never leave any food behind. He may have a nasty indigestion later but he just can’t fathom how a person can leave food behind. He also has no preference for food because to him, anything edible is better than the frostbitten starvation he experienced in his childhood winter days.
I have experience with eating disorders and again, I haven’t even experienced famine nor have I experienced an extended period of financial hardship to the point I can’t feed myself. But karma is persistent and it’s always working even when I’m not.
So, being psychologically food-scarce in 2025. Is it really that ridiculous?
In the olden olden past, famines were a result of natural catastrophe and ecosystem changes that actually blocked food production. In recent times famine is driven by humans whether it be through wars, blockades, or systemic inefficiencies in the distribution of food. This is the case for Gaza, Sudan, Burma, and more.
The Irish Great Famine, The Great Leap Forward Movement, 1990s North Korean Famine, Bengali Famine, these are some of the recent famines that predate the current famines listed above. In all of these cases there are people not too far from the famished having a superfluous amount of food. It’s not because of the lack of food; it’s a systemic deprivation of food.
As we live in this world together with people who systemically deprive food and people who are starving as a result, it’s easy to feel defeated and angry about the situation. I sympathize with that as well. But interference in times like this unfortunately can give arising to a deeper tragedy.
Suppose a man is resolving a disagreement with his wife. Who’s in the right? Who’s in the wrong? Depending on who you relate to, one person may seem right or wrong. Everybody has a contextualizing backstory that makes them right and others wrong. You see this every day on subreddits related to relationships.
But what about resolving a disagreement about technical choices at a startup? There is no right or wrong answer, but depending on the engineer’s experience it may seem like there is a strongly right or wrong answer. In matters like software engineering where it’s so far removed from people’s primary needs, there can be fights and disputes because we get so invested about our viewpoints.
What I’m trying to establish here is, people have the potential to fight over literally anything. People fight about which fictional character would be the strongest. So if people can fight about arbitrary things, it makes sense that they fight about real things that impact their lives.
It would be best if we could prevent all countries from fighting with one another. But this kind of mindset is exactly why we have a divided Korea, the political history of South America, the middle east, and Africa. Big, powerful countries who play policing roles enforce their agenda and ideology onto disputes that need to be resolved by the actual people at stake.
As we look at the history of all the major nations in the world today, they all had more or less inter-ethnic or inter-religious/inter-cultural conflicts over a certain area of the world. But practically all of the modern conflicts are the result of foreign interference.
It breaks my heart that there are people starving. It further breaks my heart to know that we throw away 1.3 BILLION TONS of food every year. Many countries and jurisdictions store food for emergencies, but they can’t release it when the food is about to expire because that will negatively impact the agricultural market. So it just… Goes to waste.
This reality of how food is inequitably distributed, I’m at a loss of words in describing how I feel. But I can’t simply point fingers as an individual and expect that inter-national, inter-ethnic, inter-religious disputes be settled.
This doesn’t mean we should stop trying, stop amplifying the voices of those who are fighting inside. It’s important to consider that our efforts toward peace and our efforts toward eradication of hunger can go hand in hand. We need to complement the amplification of voices with ACTUAL FEEDING of people.
Hunger, and its more extreme form famine, is not just limited to certain parts of the world. There are very local or domestic hungers you can help solve today while you rally for the relief of greater conflicts in the world. Additionally, we have to spend less on food that we are not going to eat and work for policies and systems that reduce food waste. Having food rot in our fridges when others are literally starving to death, after a certain point I couldn’t stomach that feeling.
There’s a saying in contemporary Korea that goes something like “I got born-ed by my parents” when describing the experience of life. None of us had the choice to be alive, and yet here we are. But because some of us were luckier than others, we get to have a full belly and sometimes even have more than a full belly just because we feel like it. Some of us who are not lucky die in the slowest, most painful way. Feeding, medicating, consoling others is a fundamental human service that YOU deserve. And because YOU deserve it, so do others.
For feeding U.S. domestic hunger, please consider No Kid Hungry.
For feeding critical aid, please consider World Central Kitchen.
For feeding internationally in relatively unknown regions, please consider Join Together Society.
Billy Seol
July Life Coach
julylifecoach.com
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