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The idea I hear is clear and simple: the techno-fascist billionaires will use AI, Palantir, drones, Flock, … to turn the world into 1984. It will be racist and sexist to show off power and control, and because the dictators are “right wing” so they have to do everything the “left wing” hates. Ordinary tech employees don’t want this and wouldn’t benefit from it, but they don’t think about it, trudging along on isolated tasks to collect a decent paycheck (The Banality of Evil).
If they limited their ideas to Mars or some bought-out city, maybe the author is motte-and-baileying, but I see no issue. Voluntary experimentation is good, maybe they do have some improved ways of running things.
There’s something to be said about how libertarians become fascists, and cyberlibertarians become cyber-fascists. I don’t think it’s a solution: tyranny collapses on itself, as the “victors” fight and die out, and doesn’t seem interesting (of course, also the ethical issues).
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.
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.
...is Cain not serving himself here? (And inb4 "well, he was serving/from the evil one", how would he have even known to do that? "The evil one" doesn't even appear in the Pentateuch, so that wouldn't make any sense to the target audience.)
Not what I meant. And I think you know that. The reason I'm doing that specifically for that chapter is to establish [3].
I mean, it pissed him off; maybe that's disadvantage enough.
But then, I think it's completely natural for Cain to be pissed off; I explained why I think that is already. [I'm also making the assumption that being without God's favor is actively bad news, which is something I failed to state originally.]
It seems that there's a distinction between 'gift' and 'sacrifice', where Cain's is the latter- but come on, you put the money in the vending machine[1] and not only does it not give you your chips, but it insults you too? You did what you were supposed to do.
But then, that's also why I think this generalizes.
The fact someone else [generic: "your brother"][2] does something better than you does something to you. You invested for no reward. You feel robbed and you feel angry[3].
So you reach out and erase what created that problem. You don't necessarily understand in that moment that it didn't actually matter what the actual material difference in the gift/sacrifice was (the text doesn't say, perhaps for that exact reason).
The specific thing I'm targeting, and what I claim is being said here, is the murder is in the class of "because you can't fucking leave it alone that someone did something better than you, in a way you can't fully describe, and with a quality you do not currently possess"[4]. You took the easy [sinful] way of "neutering anything that was better than you", because according to you[r human nature] you are supreme, not God.
Which you'll recall is the comment that I was originally responding to. That's why I said Cain was "the first socialist, his first act to redistribute Abel all over the ground". Which extends to intangibles like righteousness- the thing Cain lacks, and as such could not even begin to align with what God said to him first.
And I'm stuck pondering precisely why it's completely natural [and by extension, sinful] to be like that, where that comes from. In other words, I think the "sin" described is not even envy or greed or hatred against Abel, it's [self]-idolatry against God, and perhaps the "paradox" of the method of your own creation is that you are incentivized in every way to believe that nothing comes before you. (I maintain my assertion that human nature makes it a liability to not assume you are supreme in this way.)
And Cain's motivation and action is to intentionally hinder anyone else's efforts to do that. If he can't "possess" [4], why should anyone else?
[1] So the heart is once again being prosecuted (and yeah, Hebrews later confirms this). Also probably important for any ancient peoples that tended to view gods as magic vending machines, which if the Romans are indicative was probably true.
[2] His name, Abel, means "not important" ("meaninglessness" or "vapor"). Not really sure why a mother would ever actually name her son that, so either Eve's ahead of the curve on designer names, or this isn't describing literal history.
[3] For a bunch of human nature reasons. We were just arguing over what those might be, where they came from, and why. Cain's reaction doesn't make any sense otherwise. (And before you say "well, that's because he was evil"... if he was evil, why would he even bother bringing the sacrifice, or care about God's favor in the first place? So yeah, I think examining that is necessary- his actions doesn't make sense otherwise.)
[4] Later asserted to be "righteousness".
Oh yeah, and just to be clear:
I wouldn't even be arguing this if I didn't believe that. But by the same token, I don't think Cain and Abel are necessarily meant to be taken as if they actually existed any more than a worldwide flood persisting for precisely 150 days or a 7-day creation are; the theological messages are the point, couched in the language people around them understand.
'Serving himself' is not a clear category. Cain was obviously self-motivated in committing the murder, but he was not benefitting himself in committing the murder. The phrase 'serving himself' could cover either.
To recap a little, my position is:
Firstly, it does not make sense to describe the murder of Abel as an act of 'redistribution', or as 'socialism' in any meaningful sense. No material goods nor the distribution thereof were involved. Cain did not believe that Abel was 'stealing' anything, or that Abel's possessions were obtained unjustly. The motive for Cain's murder was envy. He acted out of hatred. Abel did well, Cain did poorly, and out of resentment Cain murdered his brother and then sought to pretend otherwise.
Secondly, Cain's motive had nothing to do with 'self-preservation'. No defense of Cain's actions along those lines is viable. Cain was not defending himself or his interests, or protecting his posterity, or making the evolutionarily optimal decision. Abel's life in no way threatened any of those things.
Congratulations - this is correct. Abel did better than Cain, and Cain felt envious, angry, and wrathful. But of course the point is that Cain was wrong to feel that way. Feelings are not self-justifying. See Jonah chapter 4. God's repeated question to Jonah is, "Is it right for you to be angry?"
So what is the point of this sophistry about redistribution, socialism, self-preservation, or evolution? The first murder was not about any of those things. Okay, I understand that now you are retreating to a more subtle point - that the psychological tendencies that underlie and motivate Cain's murder are also present in the motivations for socialist politics today. But 1) I think you should have made that point more clearly above, 2) that argument that socialism is based on envy is commonplace in conservative politics and you do not need to drag in Cain and Abel to make that point, and 3) any political position, socialism included, is held by an immense number of people for an immense number of reasons, it's impossible to fully peer into any individual's heart, and human motives are always irreducibly mixed. Envy, pride, resentment, etc., are ubiquitous and present among the adherents of pretty much every political creed imaginable.
Bringing up Cain is just a combination of bad biblical exegesis and bad political analysis. You were responding to Pongalh's correct point that socialists believe that natural resources are a kind of common heritage that should not be privately owned with a non sequitur about Cain and Abel. I think you should try to speak more clearly.
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