There is an old saying about the trials and tribulations the people of Israel faced during their forty years in the desert. On at least three occasions, they turned their backs on God and on their leader Moses, begging to return to Egypt and its grinding slavery and servitude. They preferred the familiarity of chains to the uncertainties of freedom under God’s law. In many religious education classes this lesson was distilled into a blunt maxim: you can take the slave out of Egypt, but you can’t take Egypt out of the slave.
Scripture warns us with striking vividness about this tendency to return to bondage. “As the dog returns to its vomit, so the fool returns to his folly” (Proverbs 26:11). That is not simply an observation about personal bad habits; it is a diagnosis of the human heart’s appetite for its own destruction. The apostle Peter, in the New Testament, applies the same image to those who, having once known the truth, still turn back toward evil: “A dog returns to its vomit,” and “a sow that is washed goes back to her wallowing in the mud” (2 Peter 2:22). In other words, exposure to truth does not automatically cure the lust for chains.
Rudyard Kipling, in his poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” seems to provide commentary on these biblical warnings. Writing in the aftermath of the Great War, he insists:
“There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.”
Kipling’s three images—the dog, the sow, and the burnt fool—form a kind of trinity of folly. The “burnt Fool’s bandaged finger” is especially telling: even after being burned, even after suffering real consequences, the fool cannot resist touching the flame again. This is not mere ignorance; it is an almost ritualistic return to repeated error, a spiritual pathology that always leads to emptiness.
We like to console ourselves with the cliché that “those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it.” The harsh reality is worse: those who do know their history often repeat it anyway. Does the political left not see what happened to the godless Jacobin political philosophies of the French Revolution—the rivers of blood in the name of “reason” and “progress”? Do they not see the deaths of scores of millions under communist regimes in China, Russia, Eastern Europe, and the so‑called revolutionary movements in the Third World throughout the twentieth century? These horrors are not secrets buried in archives; they are widely documented outcomes of the very ideological experiments now being rebranded as “democratic socialism.”
Taken together, the Biblical dog and sow and Kipling’s burnt fool offer an apt metaphor for the new communist left inside today’s Democratic Party. This movement has watched socialist and communist systems consistently destroy prosperity, crush conscience, and erode basic liberties. Yet it circles back to the same program of confiscatory taxation, bureaucratic planning, and radical social engineering as though historical memory itself were an enemy of progress. Like the ancient Israelites longing for Egypt, these new ideologues yearn for a return to the familiar bondage of state control—so long as the masters are their kind of people.
In that light, Kipling’s “copybook headings” are not quaint relics of Victorian pedagogy but enduring moral axioms. They remind us that when a political faction repeatedly returns to failed doctrines out of ideological appetite rather than sober judgment, it is not practicing compassion or justice. It is simply acting out the grim proverb of the dog, the sow, and the fool on a national scale—dragging the rest of us back toward the same vomit, the same mire, the same fire.
This story is repeated throughout all cultures and ages. There is nothing original in what the Democratic Socialists of America and the broader left‑wing faction of the Democratic Party have to offer. The slogans are new, the hashtags are clever, but the substance is stale: envy elevated into policy, dependence canonized as virtue, and coercion baptized as “solidarity.” What the prophets and the poet offer, by contrast, is a universal truth that, despite “Social Progress,” certain realities remain fixed. Human beings repeatedly return to destructive habits, just as a dog return to its vomit and a sow to her mire. Societies that deny moral and economic reality eventually reap catastrophe when they turn their backs on God and set themselves up as their own gods.
Atheism is the mistress of the communist mind, the necessary precondition for believing that the state can replace the Sovereign God and that planners can supplant Providence. The tragedy is that, like the Israelites pleading for Egypt, the new communist left does not recognize this move as a return to slavery. It calls it liberation. But whether in the wilderness, in Paris, in Moscow, or in Washington, the pattern is the same: the dog, the sow, and the fool, moving in circles—back to the vomit, back to the mud, back to the fire—until either repentance or ruin finally breaks the spell.
