They eat the pig food that's on offer and make their home in the pigsty.
I get the impression that when I was a student in the 1960s we were far more interested in social affairs than students today. We went out and about, waving our banners, staging our sit-ins and protest rallies. Quite a few of my friends waved the red flag of Marxism and the black flag of anarchism. But most of them are now in the City of London, as bank managers, stockbrokers, or something similar. A great hero of ours, I remember, was one of those South American revolutionary types; he ended up opening a boutique in Paris. Disillusionment and cynicism have a way of creeping in and corroding our youthful idealism. We discover that our revolutions don't work the way they were intended, and the result is that we give in to the materialism we said we despised so much. Our spiritual hunger for something better and nobler withers.
The strange thing about this boy's hunger is that it was also his hope. Had he eaten the pig food, all would have been lost. The first thing he did right was to refuse to dehumanize himself in that way. He decided to stay hungry. He opted to go on thinking and searching, in spite of the emptiness that was gnawing at his soul. The most tragic thing about many people in this world is that they are in the pigsty, eating the pig food, and oblivious to the fact. They have stopped looking for anything better.
But of course that momentous refusal wasn't enough. Not only did the boy refuse to eat pig food, he also took a long hard look at his situation, and faced up to some unpleasant truths. It takes courage to look in the mirror and accept what you see. None of us likes doing that—for we live a lot closer to despair than perhaps we can afford to admit. To surrender our precious delusions, to admit that deep down inside we are falling apart and don't know where we're going, to stop playing a role and be
