The Pain of Hunger

By Delio Vásquez

The death threat of poverty is felt in many ways, but the suffering caused by hunger is unique. Perhaps the worst part of hunger is that when you experience it, no one can tell, and so no one really cares.

Hunger is, without a doubt, physically violent. It is physically painful, and the pain endures. It is done to you by society as a whole (usually), but you experience it completely by yourself. Even though it is physiologically harmful to the body, to the brain, and to the mind, hunger does not produce a spectacle and shock the senses of bystanders like other forms of violence do. Indeed, usually, even if you are at the very edge of death by starvation or malnutrition, no one may ever notice. To not be able to see our experiences felt, mirrored, or recognized by others—to undergo suffering in complete experiential isolation—is one way that some have defined madness. Hunger and the stress of finding food bring depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.¹

Hunger produces little empathy. And today that’s largely because hunger produces no natural mutual suffering. Unlike other forms of physical violence, like murder and the violence of war—which usually traumatize the victim, and witnesses, and the attacker alike—starvation affects and traumatizes only the one. People experience hunger all the time, and this is societally normalized but the experience of hunger is not experientially socialized. A physical assault in front of us immediately affects us, but we walk by hungry people without feeling it at all. Today, one out of every eleven human beings is hungry.

The reality of a person stealing a computer, a wallet, or clothes, does not indicate that they are not hungry. If one wants to eat for more than one day, it makes less sense to steal food than to steal money or expensive goods that can be resold for more money and food. The pleasures of other forms of consumption also become real necessities for offsetting the psychological weight of hunger. When people find themselves taking dangerous risks despite the threat of state law and physical imprisonment, it is because the death threat of poverty has already been present.²

At the level of the affects (physically and emotionally), hunger can produce poor concentration, lower attention span, lethargy, and, because of the shame associated with hunger and poverty in our society, self-blame, too.³ On the other hand, hunger may also stimulate hyperactivity, anxiety, aggressiveness, anger, anti-sociality, and influence a person to interpret their experiences more negatively.⁴ It makes sense when hungry people act out. Human behavior under these conditions is variable and unpredictable, given the power of pain.

Pain can never be an illusion, regardless of its causes. The experience of pain is real, whether it occurs in a dream or in waking life.

Suffering follows from the pain associated with consciously reflecting on our pain, hunger, thirst, or desire.

Concerning pain, the philosopher Wittgenstein once stated: “The truth is: it makes sense to say about other people that they doubt whether I am in pain; but not to say it about myself.”⁵ One of Wittgenstein’s main points here is to emphasize the self-evidence of pain for the self. However, he gets his point across by contrasting the certainty of his individualized experience of pain with the doubtfulness of an observer’s awareness of and empathy for it. But is it really true that the pain of another may always be subject to doubt? Wittgenstein’s statement, strictly speaking, is true; it does make sense to say about other people that they might doubt whether or not I am in pain. But this is perhaps saying more about our low expectations of empathy from those people.

On the other hand, one might argue that from the perspective of the witness, the pain of a person is usually pretty obvious. It is in fact pretty difficult to be convincingly “tricked” by someone else for more than a moment or two about whether or not they are genuinely in pain. What I mean is that doubt does arise relatively quickly—but only when natural mutual suffering does not occur.

If someone is particularly good at causing others to feel visceral pain in empathy even when they are not actually in pain, we consider it an indication of a rare skill (and usually dishonorably so). It is not really so common to consciously doubt the pain of another, as if by some rational process of deliberation. Instead, it is more often the case that we simply fail to experience the pain of the other as experientially real to us. That is, sometimes, we fail to co-suffer. And the failure to naturally experience the pain of another seems to be virtually always grounded in objectification and othering—in distance from the sentience of the being in pain—as when doctors fail to recognize and then take seriously the suffering of their patients. In medicine, sometimes this is an effect of the scientific profession’s encouragement of objectivity and distance from the human body, and sometimes it is due to bias, as often happens when the patients are women, racial minorities, the disabled, and the poor.

By using the language of “failure,” I do not mean to place blame, but I do intend to point out a degree of intentionality that is at play. The reality that we can naturally and sometimes intentionally feel something of the pain and suffering of others is perhaps clearest in the case of torture. For the torturer, they actively seek experiential connection—visual, auditory, and affective (physical-emotional)—to the experiential state of the tortured person, in order to torture more effectively. Somewhat counterintuitively, to torture “well”—to really cause excruciating pain—depends, it seems, on something like a distorted, empathic ability. As the physician and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon described in his writings on “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” it is ironic that torture entails both a process of treating the tortured person as an object, on the one hand, and the emotional labor of social connection, accessing their experience, their feelings, and their mind, in order to cause suffering, on the other hand.⁶

And so, if someone can strive to co-suffer in order to do harm, is it that we refuse to co-suffer for good? I am inclined to believe that these dynamics are cultural and colonial in origin, built upon centuries of trauma and structured feeling. After all, empathy is more common in some cultures and societies than in others.⁷

It seems then that quite a few of capitalist society’s most enduring problems today may be analyzed in terms of the failure or limits of natural mutual suffering or feeling. We indeed proceed as if nothing is happening. The overwhelming majority of human beings, under the overwhelming majority of contexts, reject violence, and yet we are able to be surrounded by it without flinching.

And so, is not the slow violence of hunger indeed the perfect violence for our society, because it can pass without disturbing us? At what age do we learn just the right pace and eye level to maintain when we walk by the homeless person on the street, so that we may avoid slipping into eye contact and the dangerous feeling of co-suffering with their pain? And how is it, exactly, that a person can sexually assault another person—in intimate proximity with that person’s body—and not somehow feel their suffering?

Whether or not suffering is experienced in a socialized, mutual manner might usefully serve as a key indicator of the degree and strength of the level of mutuality and the socialization of experience in our communities. Just how connected are we to our environment and its beings when we experience? Are we just passing through, in a silo of mental isolation? Or can we strive to feel?

1. Notes¶