> Why had he turned his back on the world and gone off to live completely alone?
I would hardly define his way of living as turning his back from the world. He was still very much dependant on it and could obviously not live without it.
You go out, shoot a deer to survive, chop down a tree, and head home and you got some food and supplies. You go out, find a cabin, take some food and other stuff and head home and you've got some food and other supplies.
The difference is only significant if you follow the rules of society where we don't take each others stuff. But just like we don't bat an eye when we go out and take the life or supplies from an animal that is not part of society, why should a person or another creature that is not part of society think any different when they go into someones cabin and take food and supplies instead of finding the things in untouched nature? Why craft an axe from raw materials when you can just take the one that something else made that is laying right there in that log of wood?
Because the creature or its family isn't going to be planning retribution, like I'd be doing if you broke into my property and stole my stuff.
It doesn't fit nicely in our societal view of "yours" and "mine", but whenever you take something, whatever it is, you are almost always taking it away from something else. Surely "thieving" is gathering. It's just a kind of gathering that society has decided is not okay, except in all the cases where society says it's okay, like taking the animals home, or the native humans, and so on.
The plant isn't someone.
Didn't many berries evolve so that animals would eat the berries and their seeds would end up in their feces? I'm not sure how to say that without it sounding like a cause and effect. Plants didn't _intend_ to evolve so that animals would eat the berries and carry their seeds away, it was more a symbiotic relationship.
If this guy got shot stealing from people, we wouldn't just call it killing; because we have a philosophical framework about justice and retribution. If you were consistent, you'd have to be okay that this guy would be treated like a fox who raids a henhouse; up to the personal whims of the aggrieved.
From the hermits point of view, outside of the society with its philosophical framework, it is just gathering.
Society may call this theft. I may also jell at the crow stealing my unwatched food "you thief, give me back my food!". That is from my point of view, not the crows'.
To society the hermit still is human and we have morals and ethics that shall prevent us treating him as just a raiding wild animal / fox.
Or "You go out, eat the wrong food and die", like Christopher McCandless.
Thinking there's little or no difference is a gross underestimation of the difficulty of living in the wild.
McCandless would have survived if he had cabin food at hand, which means, there's a hell of a difference - a life and death type of difference.
It's fascinating how emotional people get over an individual pilfering a few supplies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Neale
The government still checked up on him on occasion and he had to return to society due to injury, but he was very much a hermit otherwise.