Does the Garden of Eden support Capitalism or Communism?
The Three Main Elements that make the Garden of Eden a Capitalist Garden
Communism is the centralised control of all production and capital by a governing body that seeks to reallocate resources across the entire community based on need.
Capitalism is the opposite. It is a decentralised system of free trade that allows individuals to bring forth produce to the market and keep their earnings to be used as they please. “Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men,” Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations, 1776).
There are elements of the story of the Garden of Eden, found in Genesis 2-3, that may appear to support Communism, such as God representing a supreme leader, the commandments coming from God, punishments given to dissenters for disobedience, and the sense that man’s sole purpose is to live for his Lord. However, this version of events excludes the second half of the story when Adam and Eve consumed the fruit and did not die, but lived, and excludes reference to the size of the garden and the role and presence of characters such as the snake. There are three main parts of the story which satisfy the criteria of Capitalism: 1) A small garden suggests a decentralised system of power, 2) Adam and Eve had equal opportunity to become like god which supports the idea that all men are made equal and 3) Adam and Eve transformed from being blind to being able to see or being naked to becoming clothed, showing that with a proper education man can grow to look after himself. These are all fundamental conditions for Free Market Capitalism as they satisfy the premise that every man has free will - or individual autonomy and economic freedom.
1 | The Size Of The Garden
In the Garden of Eden, God made man (Genesis 2:7). God then looked after man because man was unable to look after himself. Since God made man, one could argue that the life of man belonged to God. Therefore, the disobedience Adam and Eve displayed was an act of rebellion punishable by death, for their sole purpose in life was to live silently obeying every commandment of the Lord.
In a Communist system of governance, the supreme leader is the Lord God. He is all-knowing, all-powerful and all the more anointed than any other person in the land. The common man is naked, for he is a fragile, stupid and an emotional follower, incapable of caring for himself but needs to be cared for by a higher authority, such as by an anointed, elite being.
Secondly, the supreme Lord makes the laws of the land and the man has no say in what the laws are. Man is enslaved to obedience for the sake of the communal goal, sacrificing his personal dreams and desires to go along with the crowd. In other words, he has no right to make any decision for himself for his life is not his own. He may not rebel, for his rebellion will be punishable by death – which the supreme leader has every right to action since he sits above the clouds and looks down on every other man on earth.
Finally, since his people are his property and they have no right to own their own lives because they were born in a land which he owns, as soon as a new child is born – they belong to him.
“The education of all children from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions,” Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto, 1848)
However, in the Garden of Eden, the Lord God does not have that much power, for the Garden of Eden is small. God made Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve are one human being, Adam representing the flesh and Eve representing his mind – that which comes from within and helps the man. One man connotates a miniature garden. But, even if you think that God was responsible for two distinct individuals, this is still a minute number and therefore a miniature leadership. The Garden of Eden does not allude to one God and one hundred, one thousand or millions of Adams and Eves. Rather than being suggestive of a government body or a similarly large institution, God is more like a parent, and man is more like his child. The Garden of Eden is akin to the nuclear family. The word ‘Lord’ comes from the Old English ‘hlaford’ meaning the ‘breadwinner’ of the house. Hence, the Lord God providing for the man is suggestive that a parent is responsible for putting food on the table for the child they made. This decentralised system of governance spreads power across the nation to the hands of the family gardens where the heads of the garden are responsible for the survival and growth of their kids.
Secondly, it is important to stress that God made Adam and Eve. A mother loves the child she bears and births. There is a divine and unique bond that is created between parents and the child they have formed. There is an intrinsic motivation to not only protect their child but make sure that their child grows to full independence, as a result of love. Love exists in the Garden of Eden. The holy spirit of love fills the atmosphere in the decentralised system of the Free Market, whereas a Centralised system of governance is void of love because there is no bond between the big all-mighty and all-powerful institutional God and the humans he imprisons. He does not care for his people to grow and see what they may become in the future because he did not create them. For those he did create, i.e., his immediate family - they will be well fed and looked after because they are his family.
2 | All Men Are Born Equal
The Communist Garden is one where Adam and Eve remain naked forever and God remains in his seat forever. There is no replenishment of leadership – ever. This garden is not a place of beauty, where its citizens are happy to pursue their dreams and live life as they wish. This place becomes a Prison of Eden.
Adam and Eve are forbidden to become educated or dare to think for themselves. To ensure this, propaganda, fear marketing and indoctrination will replace education until Eve (man’s helper) is rendered useless. To keep man occupied, he will be allocated work, such as naming all the animals in the garden. Man's sole purpose will not be to dress and keep the garden as by his creation, but to fulfil the vision of the most high leader.
Man’s life will become secondary to God’s existence. He will be a slave as the institution tries to keep him down – prohibiting him from seeking fair and symmetrical information, listening to the other side of the story, and thence, prohibiting him from pursuing a vocation that would fill his soul. In essence, he will reduced to the likes of an animal – a sheep following his shepherd.
The Garden of Eden does not condone this. The Garden has regard for all human life, hence it does bunch men up into a collective but regards every human life as unique and special so much so that the garden reflects the relationship between one individual and his Lord. The Garden of Eden seeks to grant every man the opportunity for happiness, and the opportunity to make his own unique contribution to dressing and keeping the garden beautiful, clean, and full of light.
In the Capitalist Garden, where control is dispersed to individual households, a clear system of replenishment is encouraged since a parent wants their child to grow up and make a better future for themselves. A parent wants their child to know the difference between good and evil and make informed decisions for himself so that he does not fall privy to the hands of those who want to enslave him. We see that the Lord God was a parent who wanted Adam and Eve to graduate from home as they went on to set up their own garden where they were the head of the household, as lords over Cain and Abel.
3 | All Men Can Grow
The Garden of Eden is founded on the premise that man is made in the image of God and therefore God was once man. This system of replenishment is founded on equal opportunity, rather than equal outcome. Adam and Eve had the opportunity to become like god. They had the choice to become more educated, improve their critical thinking skills, make better decisions and lead a life based on truth to be able to obtain better outcomes for themselves. Fundamentally, they had the opportunity to succeed as well as the opportunity to fail. Since the Garden contained the components of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (representing education) and the snake (representing an opposing perspective), it provided man with the opportunity to experience the full breadth of life – i.e. the freedom to choose. And since God is the loving parent, God did not punish them for it. Even the punishments from God are artificial. Adam was “punished” to work (yet man should work), Eve was punished to pain during labour (yet, Eve was representative of the mind) and the serpent had its legs cut off to become a snake (yet, it was merely a mythical creature)... Hence, this shows that God in this story was not akin to the tyrannical evil dictator, but a loving parent proud that his child made it through their rite of passage test that earned them the ability to think for themselves. Underpinning this transformation is the point that every human being is capable of growth. Underpinning this transformation is the point that every human being is capable of growth. Eve sought knowledge to make her wise, and wise she became.