After Cain kills Abel, God curses Cain. A curse, in this theological context, is analogous to divine judgment. It is no mere magic spell spoken to ensure a specific outcome; it is not a mere technique or mode of control. Rather, it is a symbol indicating the inevitable negative consequences of acting against the Divine Order. By analogy, if someone steps off a cliff, they’d be cursed into plummeting to their death. Because Cain has operated in a certain way, a certain outcome is close to certain.1
“So now you are cursed,” says God to Cain. “You are alienated from the ground that opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood. If you work the ground, it will never again give you its yield. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.” There’s some subtlety here that is worth noting. The very ground that Cain will be alienated from is the ground, adamah in Hebrew, from which his father, Adam, was made and to which he is related as dust is related to dust. This alienation is deep and wretched. It means a profound disconnection from other dust-creatures like himself. It also suggests a profound alienation from himself. Woe to the envious, for they, unlike the meek, will not inherit the earth. Woe to the envious, for they will not know who they are.
Cain’s rivalrous mindset, in other words, spills over into every aspect of his life. With his very mode of perception contaminated by mimetic rivalry, he no longer encounters the world as it is—as his home and intimate domain—but as if it has become a counterfeit double of itself. Cain is given over to spiritual Capgras syndrome.
This idea needs some explaining. In a private exchange, and also over at his Substack, the writer Geoff Manaugh drew my attention to how helpful Capgras syndrome is as a metaphor through which we might read a number of the more telling signs of our time. I am grateful for Geoff’s insights on this since he has helped me to clarify my thoughts on various things I’ve been pondering.
In literal terms, Capgras syndrome is a rare psychiatric disorder. One of its most alarming symptoms is that a sufferer will believe that someone close to them—say, a family member or friend—has been replaced by an identical impostor. Rivalry is typically part of this strange distortion of perception. Often, the supposed imposter will seem to the Capgras syndrome sufferer to be against them.
Moving somewhat away from literal Capgras syndrome, we see a kind of spiritual Capgras syndrome at work in many ways in us and also in our world. It is worth keeping in mind that even the most severe psychiatric and psychological disorders manifest tendencies that are present in even the sanest people, albeit mitigated by sanity. This is to say, Capgras syndrome reveals a certain potential of consciousness we are all prone to. In neuroscientific terms, highlighted especially in the work of Iain McGilchrist, the specific potential I mean involves a certain overreach by the left hemisphere of the brain—an overreach that the right hemisphere needs to compensate for. But here I don’t want to be too prescriptive on this. Certainly, this thing I’m calling spiritual Capgras syndrome results from a perception shaped by the rivalrous mind—the mind of envy, resentment, and anger.
Some films point in this direction. This should not surprise us, since products of the imagination are often suggestive of certain forms of phenomenological attunement. Consider the original 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its remakes, which tell stories involving people being replaced by alien duplicates. In The Stepford Wives (the 1975 novel and film, and its remake), women are replaced with identical-looking, submissive robot versions—if ever there was a gesture towards OnlyFans, here it is. Note, however, that a kind of Capgrasianism may be implicit in the fact that there are so many remakes and reboots, not just of these stories but of countless others as well. They suggest a widespread intention to replace originals with counterfeit doubles that are often so obviously worse than the films they attempt to replicate. Perhaps. But we should also remember that this is only one way of looking at what is happening.
To always see the new as being at odds with the old is, I would suggest, likely to be the result of a Capgras-like perceptual error. It is this that I am calling spiritual Capgras syndrome. Each case would need to be evaluated on its own terms, but seldom is anything so clear-cut as to suggest what Capgras syndrome suggests; namely, that there is a radical discontinuity between what is happening and what has happened. Often, remakes and reboots are as much about renewal and recovery—or, at least, about attempted renewal and recovery—as they are about emulation and replacement. When taken in context, it is difficult to reduce them to being mere rivals.
Nevertheless, in so many domains, this rivalry is certainly evident. The perception of a fake replacing the real seems common among so many angry old folks who lament that the world itself seems to have been replaced by a fake—“Oh, the young people of today!”—that is far worse than the original world experienced back in their day. A similar thing is evident in climate change alarmists, who see civilisation itself as the fake thing that is against some original, natural state. No one, after all, could reasonably accuse Just Stop Oil activists of having a balanced perception of anything. Their perspective is essentially rivalrous. In the end, such climate alarmists have almost gone so far as to claim that all of us, all people alive today, are fakes who have replaced those dear, noble savages who once lived in harmony with nature. Many people seem to run on the oikophobic assumption that not only they but the entire West are due for a severe bout of planned obsolescence. Was this not the point of that once-popular but now near-silent WEF notion of the Great Reset?
The philosopher Jean Baudrillard represents perhaps the most extreme philosophical expression of the same spiritual Capgras syndrome. In his work, nuanced and subtle as it is in many ways, reality itself has been murdered and replaced by a simulacrum. In other words, we are so drenched in fakery, he contends, that reality is now impossible to locate. Throughout Baudrillard’s work, we see the echoes and implications of the same idea: the virtual functions as a totalising substitute for the referential. Instead of otherness, we have sameness; instead of contact, we have communication; instead of wisdom, we have information; instead of negativity, we have incessant positivity; instead of spirituality, we have therapy; instead of religion, we have technology.
As I’ve already implied, spiritual Capgras syndrome starts, as with Cain, in a certain application of our natural mimeticism. Mimetic desire is not evil, mind you. Our capacity for imitating the desires of others is given to us as a gift, and it is through this gift that we learn and grow. Because of mimetic desire, we can develop, via more saintly models, a taste for higher things. But in our pride and envy, our desires can be and often are very badly distorted, as we see in the story of the two brothers.
Cain perceives in Abel the kind of existence he lacks, but since he feels he cannot achieve what Abel has, his rivalrous mind is pushed to the limit. Abel becomes more than a rival to him; he becomes an obstacle—someone in the way of him getting what he wants. Cain, therefore, regards him, his unreachable ideal, as worthy only of elimination.
The shift is profound. Cain can no longer see Abel as his brother, and, in killing him, he destroys one whom he ought to emulate. Abel’s way is pure and noble. Cain’s is anything but that. For Cain, the real Abel is thus replaced by a two-dimensional copy. Depersonalising and dehumanising him is the first step towards eradicating him—and ultimately towards undoing himself. This is what hatred does. It transforms a person into a mere image of a person. Hatred renders the multifaceted other as a mere crude stylisation. In the process, the hater also succumbs to dehumanisation. Cain becomes less human the moment he chooses to eradicate rather than to emulate his ideal.
Notably, the story shows us the extreme case, but even in the mildest forms of this perceptual distortion that I’m calling spiritual Capgras syndrome, this warped perception is not, as certain people might think, the consequence of the murder of reality but is its cause. The murder merely solidifies it, makes it much, much harder to undo. People who endlessly grumble about how things are not as they were back in their day are not telling us about what has happened to the world, but are letting us into what has happened to them. And climate alarmists are not, primarily, telling us about what has happened to the earth’s atmosphere but about what has happened to their own spiritual atmosphere. Baudrillard seems to be reporting on the simulacrum when, in reality, he is alerting us to his own spiritual malaise. Reality may very well be accessible, after all, but it is not accessible to him.
The consequence of failing to see this—I mean the failure to distinguish between a perceptual problem (what I’m calling spiritual Capgras syndrome) and a problem in reality—is something like what we saw in a recent Mark Zuckerberg interview. I’m not talking about the fact that every Zuck interview has him (apparently) show up as someone else. No doubt, Zuck’s drama coaches have tried to stop him from seeming like a robot, but the awkward result of all the coaching is that Zuck has to perform himself instead of being himself, and he isn’t very good at maintaining a sense of continuity.
But, as I said, this is not what I’m talking about. Zuck was interviewed about one of his and Meta’s latest schemes. The basic premise, which is no doubt flawed, is that many people have very few close friends, but Zuck claims they need a few more. Enough is never enough to a person enslaved to the reign of quantity.
To fill this supposed need, Meta has been working to supply AI-friends. I’ll call them Tamagotchi Friends. Zuck appears incapable of properly distinguishing between real friends and digital simulations, and, because of this, he sees AI as a sufficient substitute for the real thing. Spiritual Capgras syndrome replicates itself. And, of course, it is particularly pervasive among big-tech technophiliacs, whose left-hemispheric overreach has been and continues to be a distinctive force in our world.
We need to see past the naive goodwill in Zuck’s desire to create simulated Tamagotchi Friends. He is part of a massive surveillance machine and cannot be trusted to care for the well-being of any of the addicts who subscribe to his brand of brain damage. Yes, I know, on one hand, in making some attempt to read his desire optimistically, we might say he’s suffering from a terrible blind spot. He simply can’t see past his two-dimensional representation of people. And yet the trouble is: countless others can see past this blindspot, but he’s not listening to them. This means, and here I will be more negative, that Zuck, like many others in big tech, manifests a profound hatred of being. By his fruits you will know him.
The curse here, of course, is the same as that of Cain, albeit dressed up in modern clothing. To keep insisting that AI will replace people is a seemingly friendly way of saying, “It’s no biggie to replace real friends with machines—there’s no real difference after all.” But then, why would anyone want real friends? To answer human loneliness by giving people a complicated but still dead object to replace human contact is tantamount to giving a stone or a scorpion to those who ask for bread. “Am I my brother’s guardian?” Cain tells God when God asks him where Abel is. God doesn’t answer him directly, but we all know the answer. Yes, Cain, you are your brother’s guardian.
I am linking Cain’s story to Zuck’s story because of a profound symbolic resonance. The consequence of Cain’s way of seeing, his attempt to trick Reality (God) by offering an untrue sacrifice and then also by not being honest with God, is found in the fact that Cain’s descendants become technologists and artificers. Cain’s way of seeing, his refusal to recognise and worship God, becomes the very reason why he is alienated. And he keeps on producing even more alienation by turning to technology as a substitute for faith. We see this again and again in those whose entire aim is to replace people with machines.
Of course, the big tech bros will put on the best face they can; they might even smile and tell you that they’re making AI for people. The artificial, they’ll say, is for the sake of the real. But, of course, the very parasitic nature of the technology they’re working with tells us that the opposite is true. AI was not made for man; man was made for AI. Every single action that AI performs relies on human work. But of course, this is just one instance of a trend you see in many other places. Wherever the resentful mind gets a grip, the two-dimensional replaces the real. Pornography replaces love. Supplements replace food. Science replaces art.
I think, for instance, of the trend of many so-called celebrity ‘cultural Christians’—I don’t need to mention their names—who in various ways have said that Christianity needs to be saved for the sake of the West. Do you see the subtle inversion of values? Here, a classic modern problem is repeated: the end and the means are switched. I mention this because what we see in Zuck’s latest gimmick is a symbol of an entire way of seeing. In spiritual Capgras syndrome, any attempt to overcome alienation using technology simply worsens the alienation. At some point, this will catch up will all of us.
The answer to all of this is found, first, in simply recognising the problem. Once you notice that you are seeing someone merely two-dimensionally, it helps to keep looking until mimetic rivalry and the sense of scandal dissipate. This is symbolised in GK Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday. In that story, a detective infiltrates a secret organisation of malicious anarchists, whose aim is to destroy the world—or something like it. The detective in question—one Gabriel Syme, who takes on the name Thursday—goes about looking for Sunday, who is the mastermind of the whole operation. In the process, he keeps on unmasking his rivals to discover, one by one, that they are not his rivals after all. Beneath every two-dimensional countenance is the most mysterious creature of all: a human being.
The truth of this story is not that no enemies exist or that all rivalries are fictions. Chesterton would never entertain the idea that there is no such thing as evil; and nor would I. The truth is that it is only once we are free from mimetic rivalry that we are free to also perceive with sufficient clarity to allow us to judge properly. Only when we are very clear on what is good can we be sure of what is not. In the end, mimetic rivalry creates such a terrible distance between us and the world that the world becomes alien; it is then, in a certain sense, replaced by an alien world. It is only love, resulting from forgiving others and receiving forgiveness, that brings things sufficiently near to allow us to look at them properly, free from any desire to dominate and control. It is only love that understands.
There is a subtle literary dimension to the cursing of Cain that is worth noting. When Adam and Eve are reprimanded by God for having disobeyed him, God doesn’t curse them. But he does curse the serpent. God also makes a strong pronouncement in Genesis 3:15 about how there will be enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. The seed of the woman is easy enough to identify: it is Seth, who is typologically related to Christ, because he symbolically represents the resurrection of Abel. But who, then, is the seed of the serpent? Well, when God curses Cain, we know the answer. It is anyone who operates according to the spirit of Cain.