Cain: A Story of Squandered "Alpha"

On Free Will and Value Creation

The story of Cain and Abel isn’t what you think it is. Superficially, it’s a story about a guy who envies his brother and kills him in a moment of anger. But more importantly, it’s a story about a guy who misunderstands the opportunity set before him. It’s about a guy who has a chance at “alpha” and squanders it. The story is not about Abel at all. It’s not about sibling rivalry. That’s all a red herring. It’s about Cain’s free will.

Cain invents sacrifice. He’s the first person in the Bible to offer a gift to God. Commentators love to insist that his gift pales in comparison to Abel’s. After all, Abel offers the best of his flock, while Cain offers only the fruits and vegetables of his harvest, but not the choicest of them. But this reflects hindsight bias. Abel has second mover advantage and easily copies and then one-ups his brother. (Plus, if we want to strengthen Cain’s defense, a blemished tomato is called an “heirloom”; who is to say that the non-select produce is significantly worse than the select produce?) Abel’s sacrifice is reactive. Of course, he’s going to improve on Cain’s sacrifice, but his improvement is incremental. Cain goes from zero to one (no sacrifice to sacrifice), while Abel merely goes from 1 to 2 (sacrifice to choicest sacrifice). Abel generates no “alpha,” vis a vis sacrifice, to borrow the financial metaphor. He offers pure “beta,” as his birth position implies.

God’s acceptance of Abel’s gift and non-acceptance of Cain’s is a set-up for a unique opportunity for Cain. Note that while the text says God pays no favor to Cain’s gift, it doesn’t say God outright rejects Cain. Cain takes God’s response as an ultimatum on both himself and his gift, rather than listening to what God says:

Surely, if you do right,
There is uplift.
But if you do not do right
Sin couches at the door;
Its urge is toward you,
Yet you can be its master. (Gen. 4:7)

Assuming that God is the driver of all value, we must ask what can we as humans do to add value to God’s world? Is it possible for human beings to create value? I clearly don’t mean this from an economic point of view, but from a metaphysical point of view. Since the entire world is God’s and since all of our gifts and talents are from God, how do we know that we are generating any value of our own? Isn’t it more accurate to say that any value creation we engage in is merely optical, a function of being in the right place at the right time. We’re in the right seat, but we didn’t earn the seat. There is one answer to this question and it’s free will. When we use free will to choose the good—when we are equally pulled towards the right and the wrong—and we choose the right, we can be said to have created value, metaphysically speaking. Abel is not given the opportunity to choose good because he is not tested. Cain is given the gift of having to choose good while being tempted by evil. The temptation to act on his base instincts is what enables him to have a shot at generating alpha in the metaphysical sense.

That Cain fails is not the point. In fact, it’s necessary as an example to prove to us that our success is not guaranteed. It is this lack of guarantee (i.e., risk) that is the corollary of alpha. I will go even further: Abel, whose name means nothingness or vapor is not so named simply because he is a victim. Rather, the Torah teaches that Abel’s value creation is marginal. Cain, meanwhile, whose name is connected to acquisition and even creation (“Kaniti ish et Elohim” —> “Koneh shamayim v’aretz”), is so named because he acquires the ability to generate value by choosing good or evil.

After Cain fails, he is given the famous “mark of Cain,” a letter on his forehead reminding others that only God can punish him. Agamben’s work on Homo Sacer well captures the political condition of Cain as existing in a “state of exception.” But there’s a deeper point to his mark. It is the mark that says “I am a failed creator of alpha; nonetheless, respect me for the fact that I even had this opportunity in the first place. Learn from my own example and ask yourself, ‘What is your test?’ Where is your alpha?” Ironically, Cain’s example may be a cause for shame in himself but a cause for uplift in others. His stigma is also a kind of gift, signaling to others that there is something holy about his condition.

Many of us find ourselves in the right place at the right time. We benefit from gifts and opportunities that are not properly ours, whether by nature or nurture, but one thing that is entirely ours is our free will. Even Kant—who otherwise embraced determinism in the physical world—thought as much. When we use our gifts and opportunities well we are mostly generating “beta.” An intelligent person who uses her intelligence to become a cutting edge researcher executes well, but gets no credit for being intelligent. But a person who is faced with a hard choice and does the right thing has genuinely moved the cosmos. Anything else and you’re just benefiting from being in the right seat. Not screwing up beta is fine, and keeps the lights on, and if everyone stopped executing on it, the world would be worse off. But if you are a person striving to be great, to outperform the average, ask yourself what is in your freewill, and what you can do to choose the good but difficult thing.

Happy New Year,

Zohar

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