The Manifestation of Cain and Abel

            I am not a religious person, though I do believe the old religious stories do have value to them. I mean if they did not have a value, why would they have been repeated over and over again? They are stories known, more or less, throughout the Western world. What makes them so great is that they play on archetypes. This allows them to be applied almost universally and still make sense, still hold truth. In the story of Cain and Abel, Cain (the older brother) kills Abel. He kills his younger brother because God favors Abel’s sacrifices more. Cain resents his brother for living a better life then he is. This can be seen played out across the Western world in the guise of Social Justice.

            One of the earliest movements of Social Justice was Occupy Wall Street. The protestors do not really want to help the poor, which is not their aim. Instead they aim to hurt the rich, or the 1% as they call them. Yet the protestors fail to recognize two glaring personal contradictions. The first being they are from a well off upper middle class family attending college. They are going to become the 1% they claim to hate. They broadcast this hate using laptops and cell phones produced by the very capitalistic system they are marching against.

The second is that maybe it is a good thing we have people who are able to get things done have a lot of money. Elon Musk is in the 1% and he is a very intelligent person who seeks to eliminate fossil fuel cars. Not by regulating them out of existence but by providing a better cleaner option in the market place. Bill Gates is using his fortune to wipe out disease and parasites such as the Guinea Worm. Perhaps it is a good thing these are the people in the 1%.

            Next is the Social Justices love of Communism. In the Soviet Union as part of their ‘glorious revolution’ they ended up killing all the ‘rich’ farmers. As it would be the ‘rich’ farmers were also the most productive farmers. The people who hated them were glad to be rid of them, but when winter came and there was not enough food people starved to death. So many people that the government had to put up signs staying it was illegal to eat your children. This makes sense in the context of the Cain and Abel story because Communism is predicated on the idea of resentment. The working class should resent the bourgeois because they are doing better than them and the only way they are doing better is because they are stealing from the working class.

            You also here this when Black Lives Matter marches or speaks. They blame their problems on racism, specifically institutional racism. They do not think that maybe something they are doing wrong has anything to do with their situation in life. Instead they blame racism or white people for what has gone wrong in their lives. College professors and politicians are feeding into this resentment victim narrative.

            The common thread between these stories is the resentment of those who are doing better. They do not look at their life and say ‘what can I do to make my life better and thus the lives of those around me.’ Instead they look at other people’s lives and get angry that they are not doing as well. If the story of Cain and Abel is playing out in our society and these groups are at the resentment stage, how much longer until that resentment leads to the tragic end?