Infovores

Humans are omnivores. We don’t eat only meat—carnivores—nor do we derive energy only from plants—herbivores. We’ll eat anything. But I think this categorisation is lacking. See, we are more than omnivores.

In the second volume of The Last Lion, William Manchester says:

“In combat a leader’s greatest need is information, and if he is competent he does everything possible to establish a communications system that will survive in the chaos of battle, and, if possible, at least one backup net, for what works well in peacetime maneuvers may disintegrate and vanish when great armies clash in the fog of war.”

These communication systems transport information, a thing which Primo Levi rated as essential for survival in the concentration camps. From his crowning work, The Drowned and the Saved:

“Right then and there, you cannot understand the orders and prohibitions or decipher the regulations, some of which are futile and insulting, while others are crucial. In short, you find yourself in a void, and realise at your own expense that communication generates information and that without information you cannot live. Most of the prisoners who did not know German–almost all the Italians, in other words–died within the first ten to fifteen days of their arrival: at first sight, from starvation, exposure, exhaustion, or disease; but on closer examination from insufficient information. If they had been able to communicate with more senior prisoners, they would have had an easier time getting their bearings. They would have learned more quickly how to procure clothes, shoes, and illegal food; to avoid the toughest jobs and the often deadly encounters with the SS; and to manage the inevitable diseases without making fatal errors. I do not mean to say that they would not have died, but they would have lived longer and had a better chance of regaining lost ground.”

Yes, humans are omnivores. But more importantly, we are infovores. As Levi stated, starved of information, cut off from internal and external feedback about ourselves and the world, we die.