By David Deming

It’s been said that conservatives view leftists as people with bad ideas, while leftists view conservatives as bad people, period. My personal experiences on social media reinforce this. Any attempt to engage a leftist in a dialogue is futile. There is no bridging the chasm. Not only are leftists unable to construct arguments, they fail to even grasp what an argument is. Logic and facts escape them. It’s not that they have bad ideas – they don’t have ideas at all.

Significant insight into the leftist mind can be obtained from the Bible. Although the narratives of the Bible are no longer widely accepted as empirical facts, it remains the most influential book in the history of Western Civilization. The stories of the Bible provide unparalleled insight into human psychology.

The chronicle of Cain and Abel is one of the memorable and significant parts of the Bible. As Jordan Peterson has pointed out, Cain and Abel are the first real human beings. Adam and Eve were formed directly by God. Their sons, Cain and Abel, are the first humans spawned through the normal biological process. And Cain, the murderer, is the first leftist.

The story is short and tragic. Cain, the older brother, is “a tiller of the ground,” while the younger brother, Abel, is “a keeper of sheep.” Both brothers make offerings or sacrifices to God. Abel’s sacrifices are accepted, but Cain’s are not. Cain becomes angry and dejected.

It is a fact that the ancient Hebrews made animal sacrifices. Sacrifices were also made of grain or flour. But the offerings or sacrifices attributed to Cain and Abel were not of this type. Rather, what is being described are not material sacrifices but the sacrifice of the present for the sake of the future. In other words, the delay of immediate gratification for the sake of future well being. This is also the theme of Aesop’s fable, the Ant and the Grasshopper. The ant works hard all summer, laying away food for the winter, while the grasshopper dances and plays in idleness. The grasshopper lives for today while the ant diligently prepares for tomorrow. When winter comes, the ant is warm and safe, but the grasshopper freezes and starves to death. The self-discipline necessary to delay gratification and submit to hard work has always been a prerequisite for happiness and success in life.

My interpretation is substantiated by the Biblical text. After Cain becomes angry, God tells him directly that it’s his own fault: “if thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door.” The rejection of Cain, his failure, is not an arbitrary act by God, but a direct result of Cain’s own actions or lack thereof. Nor is it even necessary to believe in God to appreciate the circumstances described here. Cain is not rejected by the whim of a capricious deity. He fails because he does not apprehend natural law, cause and effect, and therefore is unable to manipulate and control his environment.

Faced with the bitter reality of his failure, Cain has the opportunity to do the right thing. He can humble himself, go meekly to his younger brother, and ask for instruction that he might learn and improve his situation. But Cain, like most people, is unable to do this. He is unable to accept the fact of his inferiority and thereby acknowledge the superiority of his brother.

The nature of Cain’s deficiency is unspecified. He may lack the discipline to get out of the bed early in the morning and work in the fields. He may lack the intelligence or the common sense necessary to make good decisions. He may be lazy, stupid, or both. The bottom line is that he is inferior to his younger brother in whatever qualities are needed for success in life.

The reality that some people are superior to others is taboo in modern American society. We live in a culture that by historical standards is unusually egalitarian. The roots of our egalitarianism lay in our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, where Thomas Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal.” But of course, all men are not equal. No matter what metric is employed, no person in the world is exactly equal to any other. No two persons are equal in height, weight, academic or athletic ability, intelligence, or anything that can be quantitatively measured. Even identical twins can develop significant differences during their lifetimes. When he wrote “all men are created equal,” Jefferson was referring to equality before the law, not absolute equality. And when Jefferson wrote, even this political equality was implicitly restricted to free white men.

Cain does not fall immediately into error. He broods. “Sin lieth at the door.” He doesn’t understand Abel, because he lacks the imagination and intellect to conceive of anyone acting differently than he does. He doesn’t see that his younger brother has become more successful because he works harder, makes better choices, or has more intelligence and self-discipline. Cain can only imagine another person thinking and acting exactly as he would do himself. Thus, he projects all of his deficiencies onto other people.

Ultimately, Cain cannot live with the fact of his inferiority. Hour after hour, day after day, envy gnaws at his ego, and Cain’s mind responds by torturing and twisting reality. He attributes his failure to Abel. Abel is not an example to be emulated and admired, but a villain that has somehow, through a million devious devices, exploited Cain. Cain imagines himself to be a victim. Once the nature of the crime and the identity of the perpetrator becomes established in Cain’s mind, there can be only one redeeming act: Abel must be killed. The killing of Abel achieves two goals simultaneously. First, Cain obtains all of Abel’s possessions and wealth, items that he considers to have been stolen from him. Plunder is transformed into reparation. Second, Cain wipes away the stain of inferiority and establishes in an unmistakable way his own superiority. He has survived and triumphed. Cain is alive, while Abel lays dead, having lost everything. Surely, this is proof of Cain’s superiority.

Cain’s triumph is short-lived. He becomes a “fugitive and vagabond,” he is “cursed from the earth.” Cain can still produce nothing. He can only destroy. He is forever trying to escape from reality. His anger and hatred can never be appeased. Anyone better than him in any way is scapegoated. The die has been set, and Cain can never reverse course and come to terms with his own deficiencies or confront the enormity of his crime.

This is the great division of mankind. Some of us are the sons and daughters of Abel, others the descendants of Cain. Producers and destroyers, good and evil. Productive people value freedom. They only want to be left alone, to be free from predation so they can create and produce. The inferior do not value liberty. Left to their own devices, they fail. They nurture hate and resentment, see themselves as perpetual victims, and forever seek to use force to control others. That’s why leftists are perpetually angry, commonly resort to violence, and place no value on individual freedom. They lack the insight to comprehend that anyone could be different, thus they forever project their own psychological propensities onto others.

The chronicle of Cain and Abel explains the history of the United States. When Europeans discovered the Americas, it was a unique opportunity in the history of the world for creative and intelligent people to emigrate and free themselves from incessant predation. The Americas offered danger and hardship, but boundless opportunities. Only an ambitious person in search of the freedom to be productive would have made the dangerous voyage and faced the challenge of the wilderness. Over four centuries, these people and their descendants built the most powerful and prosperous country on earth. The US is the only nation whose government is devoted to protecting the natural rights and liberties of man. But now that the wilderness has been conquered, hardships overcome, and wealth abounds, the US attracts exactly the opposite type of person, the envious predator who only wishes to consume what others have produced.

There is an utter and complete moral clarity to this story. Leftists are evil, because they are in revolt against the natural order of the cosmos. They can only destroy and plunder, they cannot create or produce. Chaos follows everywhere in their wake. There can be no accommodation or compromise with the political left. Appeasement only whets the appetite of the beast. If human civilization is to endure and progress, the political left must be exposed, repudiated, and defeated.

David Deming is Professor of Arts & Sciences at the University of Oklahoma. Follow him on X @profdeming.