« If We Free Cain & Abel to be Myth, Then All of Us Get Indicted »

Once I understood the brothers, Cain and Abel, mythologically, freed from history, I began to make other connections. The more I learned about the two worldviews they embodied, the more I recognized how Abel represented those who saw Earth as a great commons, providing enough for all through the highly cooperative human work of herding and a nomadic, migratory lifestyle. Cain, on the other hand, represented those who believed that improvement came when humans worked the soil to produce enough so that settlements could happen. Villages, and then cities, followed.

Increasingly, these settlers enclosed the commons, evolving practices allowing for private ownership. Their gains competed directly with the interests of migratory communities. Enclosing the commons continued as a trend, increasing over centuries into the present. Today, people with wealth, corporations, and richer nations follow in this centuries-long pattern of bringing commonly held land into private, highly-profitable ownership. Doing so has been essential to Multi Earth “success.” It’s a primary way that the worldview of Cain has thrived through countless incarnations into the present.

The storytellers who conceived of the Cain and Abel story show dazzling understanding of how worldviews create sharply contrasting worlds. Just as they understood Abel and Cain to represent the two distinct big-picture stories of their time, so also today, life on our planet is defined as a choice between two macro-stories, Multi Earth and One Earth, “descendants” of Cain and Abel. Whether then or now, when Cain killed his brother, Abel, it expresses the deep and murderous separation that happens every time the Multi Earth story splits anew from One Earth ways, believing itself to be a superior way. But if we keep the brothers locked up in a historical story, then Cain is only the prototype of murderers, the ones we criminalize, not the kind of murder with which all of us Multi Earth practitioners kill life on our planet.

Question: How does freeing Cain and Abel to be myth instead of history make them far more dangerous to Multi Earth living?