Defeating Cain

Resisting Our Libertarian Strain

Cain is dead. But his spirit still wanders the earth. First, he was guilty of fratricide, killing his brother. Now he has expanded his enterprise, sponsoring fratricide, parricide, infanticide, and neighbourly apathy.

Where you find the living spirit of Cain, you find the death of neighbourliness. For various reasons, it becomes impossible to take a genuine interest in your neighbour’s affairs. Where Cain pitches his tent, hyper-individualism rises like a tower in the sky. And this influence of Cain, this wandering spirit speaks thus—just as it was in man's early beginnings: “Am I my brother's keeper?”

Cain smiting Abel

To “mind your business” is good advice for curing one's voyeurism, the itch to compare lots, and the tendency for gossip. But to mind your business as a rule for taking no interest in your neighbour's well-being is to have Cain sitting firmly on your shoulder. To see your brother running for the cliff without restraint, knowing fully well what will become of him, without stepping in to do anything about it and finally see him come to his ruins; all in the name of minding one’s business is still to do the work of Cain.

Thus Cain speaks loudest when ‘minding one’s business’ becomes apex morality. To be seen as a “good person” by how much evil you can ignore rather than oppose is to have Cain as the founder and builder of your city. To give no mind to what others do consensually because “it is not harming anyone” is to be Cain and to be stupidly Cain. For it assumes that the one doing the deed and the one minding his business have a complete and foolproof mental directory of what constitutes harm. To hold this assumption is to be blunted in one’s thoughts, deficient in wisdom, and dull in all sense.

Who says harm is only violence? Harm may not appear now. The sins of the fathers are very often visited on the sons up to the third and fourth generations. And to preempt protests of a divine “visiting,” we need not appeal to the divine visiting. For the fruits of the sins of greed and corruption of a nation’s leaders at a time are delivered to the generations that come after them. A nation whose leaders squander their resources and borrow so much that for decades their descendants have to keep paying, is this not already a visiting? Parents ought to leave inheritances for their children. But the one who leaves debt has given his children twice the burden to carry. A parent who soils his name for riches; who gives his mind to his wanton pleasures and does not foresee the harm this might visit on his family will have his children picking up the pieces of his deed. This is the natural consequence of a selfish deed. Visiting can be empirically traced. The evil that men do surely lives after them.

Being careful in your deeds to avoid inflicting your neighbour unnecessarily is good. But Cainly freedom says otherwise. It casts off all care and selfishly does what it wants to do without giving a second thought to how it impacts others. This way, “mind your business” curves in on itself and takes a libertarian strain to do what it wants in so far as it lends the same privilege to others. Giving room for all sorts and types of damaging degeneracy that we refuse to confront in the name of minding one’s business. Same-sex ‘unions’ are not harmless; contrary to what they would have you believe.

And this is how we kill our brothers. Not with stones or a cudgel. But by standing afar off as we see him do the very things that ruin him. All because we do not want to appear judgmental; we wish to be accepted, to maintain ‘goodness’ according to the abdicating Spirit of Cain. We maintain a good reputation by sacrificing our brothers on the altar of “doing nothing.” For with Cain, it was zero-sum: God had refused his sacrifice because of Abel’s. Therefore, Abel must leave the picture. So it is now: we must be good people at all costs, even if it means our neighbour’s life coming to ruin which we might have prevented. Like one man who watched a woman drown because he could not find anyone to hold his two phones. Like the Pharisees who would rather ‘keep’ the Sabbath than see someone healed. This is how Cain rules in the hearts of men under a libertarian banner. It makes one scared of disapproval and thus disapproves of one doing the right thing if the cost is one’s reputation. No one wants to be called a bigot. Even when bigotry saves lives.

These seeds of Cain have been long sown. Now we are eating its bitter fruit. For it takes tremendous courage for a man to speak loudly against female indecency, without being met with bulveristic accusations of lust; being accused of having impure thoughts by looking at a woman who is dressed like meat on a butcher’s slab. What response can one have against a thought-terminating cliche such as “to the pure all things are pure”? For by that, they insinuate that one can stare down the most horrendously dressed woman and not be moved.

But it is the Spirit of Cain that makes men and women not care about what they wear. For they wear whatever they want thinking “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  And the Spirit of Cain, working on the other side of the sword, remonstrates the observer thus, “What is it to you?”

Is it up for debate that we are all partakers of society? Granted, men must control their eyes and thoughts. But women must also cover-up. We owe these to one another. That is how we suppress Cain: by realising and admitting what we owe to one another. Women owe to men to dress well—barring other and more ultimate concerns. Men must be sober, self-controlled, and upright.

But it is unfair to think that what one wears carries no import in the society one lives. I owe what I wear to others around me for they especially, even more than myself, are the ones who see my clothes. This is also an argument for stylistic conventions, but I digress. 

If we believe that the eyes are the window to the soul; if we realise that our thoughts do not stand independently of our eyes, then the imperative drops from heaven that we must take care of what we see with our eyes. And as a collective, collected, and interconnected people, we must work together to forge conventions that protect the soul’s window. This is a case for decency and beauty. This is true of clothes as it is of art and artefacts. And buildings and architecture. Of neon lights and obscene billboards. Of movies and music. There is an empirical case for decency that Libertarian Cain has dulled our collective senses to be unable to make. People shriek like vampires in the presence of garlic when you mention “decency.” What can I say? Cain stultifies.

It stultifies when it reprimands the observer of whorish outfits. And it harms all parties involved: it harms the loose, the self-controlled, and the wearer of such an outfit.

The loose man, the one without self-control, without discipline; the one whose walls are so fallen that invaders of all kinds can stray into his spirit without resistance is harmed when the harlot’s outfit crosses his path. He stoops to his base instincts and in that sense loses his uprightness; he crouches like a dog and pants with his tongue out after everything that excites his genitals. He is not innocent. Yet we must pity him. Nonetheless, we can reduce the incidences of men becoming beastly with better dressing conventions. Good dressing conventions offer us a double advantage: first, they reduce slips and incidences; second, they expose animals and utter degenerates who even decent items of clothing cannot restrain.

Yet not all are degenerates. Even the self-controlled man is not helped by such looseness as Cain has foisted upon us. The self-controlled man who going about his business, and his eye survives the assault of multiple whorish outfits as it is common today, has to expend twice the energy to stay on guard. The eye being a window to the soul, every occurence becomes a chip in his defences; one drop of pollution at a time. And like a city with barbarians at the gate, the army and sentry must work twice as hard to stop them from breaching. He might not fall but we increase the chances of his stumbling. This is cruel. It subtly punishes people who already exert themselves towards self-control. A society that punishes its virtuous people should not exist. What bliss it would be if the virtuous man expends less effort to stay on guard around Cain’s harlotry.

Nonetheless, the person harmed the most in all of this; although Cain would have you be ignorant of this harm, is the person who wears such an outfit because, to her, all that matters is her comfort and her “feeling beautiful.” For like a butchered pig at the abattoir, she depersonalises herself and advertises the human body over the human person so as to eclipse the soul. If the highest virtue your soul can aspire to is comfort at the expense of concealing the light of your person, then surely your soul is degenerate. As it is, one reason we properly cover our bodies is so that our persons may shine through, to announce, without our bodies stirring distractions, that a person lies beyond the flesh presented. To put flesh on display is to silence the persona and hawk lust. It is not fair to oneself to dress as one would not like to be addressed.

Whoever coined “dress the way you wish to be addressed” wasn’t some buffoon. But a truly wise and intelligent person who knew that meaning is a thick web of reinforcement that cannot just be cut down by libertarian whims. The term “dress like a harlot” survives as Lindy, spanning over four millennia of human history. It is laughable that anyone thinks they can cut down this thing that has outlived their ancestors. But that is Cain’s boasting: he thinks he can outrun the consequences of his actions.

Overall, Cain shows up in places where people fear to help people even when it is the right thing to do. It shows up when people are scared to confront the vices of abortion —manifesting as “reproductive rights.” It shows up when as addressed above, you cannot confront whoredom which calls itself “bodily autonomy.” Cain speaks where valid medical advice opposing obesity is called “fat shaming.” It is there when the thought of objective beauty is the anathema, and wet cement is orthodoxy. Cain is right there when people say all relationships are transactional. Cain bellows in the anti-natalism that sees bringing children into the world as evil. Abel dies once more when people spurn their parents because they did not ask to be born. It is utter Cain to possess a view that you owe the world nothing. Whereas we are all interconnected, Cain has run wild and he is destroying the fabric of all social connection.

This is not to say that we must be moral busybodies. Or endless interventionists. Always intruding on other people's affairs. It does not mean being nosy or acting like We know it all. We are not to be in people's faces and businesses like we have all jurisdiction. The right dose of neighbourliness here must be decided on fine lines. We must be prudent in our efforts and know when not to cast our pearls before swine. We must discern when to go down with the ship and know when to let Troy burn while fleeing it. Be ready to give a hand before preaching.

What does it take to defeat Cain? Fear not, love your neighbour, stand on the truth. Stand on the truth. Stand on the truth. Love the “good.” Our love is neither ignorant nor flimsy. Nor is it sentimental. We love people in light of knowledge, truth, and the “good.” That is how we rein in Cain. When next Cain, sitting on your shoulder, asks, “Are you your brother’s keeper?” The answer is one word and three letters: “YES.”

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And here is a meme from The Department of Defeating Cain…