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Socialists demand universal control, not a plurality of ideas. The idea that a colony of Randists could happily exist in a remote mountain canyon or even on Mars is deeply offensive. All must conform.
"Socialists" tend to stop at their own borders, and I'm rolling my eyes that the Democrats who control the two most powerful centers of capitalism that have ever existed are some kind of Commie.
But there are plenty of bolt holes for Randian supermen and there will remain so. Dubai and Singapore exist as well as special economic zones in places like Cambodia and Laos where anyone can do anything if they have the cash. Would be Randians tend to stay in the US though because America provides certain freedoms and protections that strong mercantile city states and free wheeling gangster zones lack. Plus it's cool. Besides Libertarians have the same problem Communists do no one wants to vote for them so despite wanting no state they end up with one to control the enlightened peasants.
Ask Finland about how the USSR stopped at its own borders. Or eastern Poland.
And even when they do stop at borders, they do things like build "anti-fascist" walls to keep their
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The entire history of socialism is one of striving for international dominance that transcends borders. I mean, they called their meetings internationals.
Of course, socialism is the ultimate motte and bailey, where the motte is “we just want health care” and the bailey is “kulaks against the wall”. At this particular moment, the socialists have escaped the motte and are running all over the bailey.
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Well, socialists believe those rich people are absconding with resources that don't belong to them. It's not just some demand that people near and far must all conform.
Indeed, it's also the murder of those people if they won't.
The earliest recorded socialist was Cain, who believed (trivially, correctly) that Abel was obtaining God's favor with resources that don't belong to him.
The first act of socialism ever practiced by humanity was redistributing Abel all over the ground.
From Cain's perspective, Abel obtaining God's favor that way was stealing (and purposefully ignores "obtaining God's favor" is the entire reason those resources were put there in the first place: "obtaining God's favor" and "being better than Cain" were one and the same for Cain, though).
Interestingly, the punishment for that was not death, but exile and divine protection from anyone else murdering him. (And the even more interesting implication is that Cain having done this doesn't seem to be stated as categorically/unequivocally evil, either.)
In what way did the resources not belong to him?
You might assert that Abel does not own his sheep in the sense that nobody can own any natural resources, because all resources, animals, plants, etc., are created by God. But Cain does not seem to have objected to Abel having a flock of sheep in the conventional, everyday sense of the term.
Moreover joking about 'redistribution' here seems like just a bad interpretation of the text? Cain's motive is not to steal any of Abel's material goods. Cain does not take Abel's sheep, nor even Abel's physical body. It's hard to read as a 'redistribution' of God's favour, because there is no reason for Cain to think that murdering Abel will somehow cause God to favour Cain. On the contrary, Cain attempts to conceal his actions from God. It looks to me like Cain (correctly) believes that God would look upon his act with disfavour.
Surely the traditional reading of this text, where Cain was motivated by envy, hatred, and pride, just makes more sense? Abel had done well, and Cain was envious, and that envy curdled into bitterness and despising. He killed Abel not as part of some strategic move to take anything that belonged to Abel, for Cain makes no attempt to take anything of Abel's. Nor does he make any suggestion that Abel committed an injustice. Cain was angry that Abel had been favoured more than he had been. That was it. That was the whole cause.
I'm not really being rhetorical. (Hence why I think it actually is redistribution even though no physical resources were exchanged.)
Is not one of the problems with sin that human nature vindicates it as the right thing to do? If you completely ignore God in this story, Cain did the objectively right thing- he took out a competitor that was better [assuming God liked Abel's offering better because it was better] than he was.[1]
Merely being worse than someone else is an inherent threat per human evolution- at any moment, they might plant their flag over you, and demand you serve them instead. Evolutionarily-speaking, they'll reproduce, not you.
And even more interestingly, God doesn't take away his life for doing this (the effect of the punishment- one might say the wages of sin- is exile/separation)- rather, he finds a wife[2], and his descendants become very powerful (maybe polemic, but you get the picture). Indeed, he does reproduce successfully.
But here, the message is essentially saying that these natural impulses- you have "envy, hatred, and pride" to keep you alive and reproducing- are in conflict with God's will?
As Cain points out to God, what the fuck? How could self-preservation be the wrong answer here (with his excuse that it's Abel fault Abel failed at that -> why should Cain be responsible for Abel's
self-preservationkeeping)? How could, and why should, God care more about convergence/alignment with His will thanthe desires of the fleshhuman self-preservation, and why would He label putting the latter above the former here "sin"? (Furthermore, why the generic? Why is "sin" singular?)(What would God have to do to conclusively prove that's what His values are? Maybe come to Earth as a human being, fully loaded up with that instinct, and then at every turn forced to intentionally violate that... to the point of a particularly humiliating death? Yeah, I can't see why I, a creature of
human instinctsin, should be impressed by that either.)[1] It wasn't just having the resources, it was leveraging them to gain an advantage that Cain has a problem with. The effort was perhaps equal but the outcome was not, because Abel had something Cain didn't that made God favor Abel more, and used resources [that were ultimately God's, hence the offering] to do that- ignoring God willing this to be so, why should it only be Abel that gets the advantage?
[2] I find it rather humorous how the first part of the passage reads a lot like a concrete "these 2 humans", but then dumps this framing at the end such that it only makes any sense in the abstract "spherical cow in a vacuum" way (re: "if there are 3 humans on Earth, and in the very next chapter we see Eve give birth to Abel's replacement, then where did Cain get his wife?").
Objectively in what way? In terms of objective self-interest, it's hard to see any benefit for Cain here - even if we take God's wrath out of the picture entirely, what benefit is there for Cain in murdering someone who seems like a valuable ally? If you want to bring up evolution here, Cain and Abel are brothers - kin selection seems like it would recommend Cain and Abel working together to help each other. I don't think there's either a biblical or an evolutionary justification for the idea that somebody else being talented is inherently a risk to you, or for the idea that destroying a similarly- or more-talented person to yourself is necessarily beneficial.
Incidentally, it is not clear whether Abel was in fact superior to Cain. Abel was a herdsman and Cain was a farmer, and implicitly they both seem to have been capable in their roles. Normally I would have thought that herdsmen and farmers can mutually benefit from working with each other. Per Hebrews 11:3, Abel's advantage was his righteousness, but righteousness is not zero-sum. I do not see how Cain can become more righteous by murdering Abel, nor how Abel's righteousness in any way disadvantages Cain. In purely material terms, would they not both have benefitted more through cooperation?
Cain obtained neither relative nor absolute advantage through murdering his brother.
The idea that it's 'objectively' right to kill a friendly, cooperative person merely because they are not yourself is ludicrous.
There is no sense whatsoever in which murdering Abel improved Cain's ability to reproduce, or provide for his offspring. Likewise there is no sense whatsoever in which Abel's life, or his righteousness and favour with God, disadvantaged Cain, such that he would have had to kill him to secure his ability to have a family. That is simply not in the text, and neither can it be reasonably extrapolated from the text.
(It may also be worth noting that all of Cain's line died out in the Flood. You might say that counting God's intervention is cheating, but I think that trying to read the early chapters of Genesis while removing God from the narrative is absurd. The whole story is about God. We aren't talking about a historical coincidence where it just randomly happened that Cain's descendants all died. The story of Genesis deliberately interweaves historical events with human righteousness or unrighteousness and corresponding divine action.)
This story is not about self-preservation.
Why, yes, if you interpret Cain's actions to be something that they were clearly not, and in service of a cause that they were clearly not in service of, you may come up with some different conclusions. But I don't see what weight or meaning that would have for anybody else. Cain's murder of Abel had nothing to do with survival or self-preservation - not even through an evolutionary lens. Evolution is not a war of all against all, where the most psychotically murderous being wins. Evolution and natural selection include cooperation and family.
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