Their inner worlds are filled with delusion. They don’t just deceive others: they deceive themselves. They create elaborate structures in their heads of how the world works which bear no real relation to how it actually does work.
Correspondingly, their emotional lives are filled with notions of who and how they are, what sort of person they are, and what sorts of emotions they feel and why, and NONE OF IT IS TRUE. It is all lie.
So it should come as no surprise that in, say, Cuba, they can look at mass horror, desperation, failure, poverty and injustice, and see happiness, success, empowerment, and plenty. They have free education, you see. And free medical care. And it is the “Republic of Cuba” so of course they are free politically. Why wouldn’t they be? Only wrong views are corrected. Everything else is allowed. The Party exists as a Friend to the people, and is much better than God, since God doesn’t exist.
So in the same way a person can be cruel and perceive themselves as kind–and by the way this has been true of most Christians, or at least the Church, for most of its history–so too can governments destroy the hopes and happiness of their people and see it as “liberation”. Leftists always use this word “liberation”. They invent the crimes, then “rectify” them with real ones, then lie about all of it.
From an emotionally strategic perspective, the movement to oppose “bourgeois morality”, and then reason itself–which after all is the attempt to correlate action with the supposedly desired outcome, which is measured honestly–creates the freedom for unlimited and unopposed delusion.
What you see, in other words, in a Communist regime, is the physical manifestation of unprocessed gut energy. What you see is hell, painted over as heaven.
I think it can be stipulated as a general principle that all of us create in the world what we are. This means that to create a better world, the would-be savior needs first to create a truly good self. This does not mean becoming a vegan or learning rote and angry political ideas. It means sitting quietly until all the horrific and angry and painful and unpleasant feelings floating around are integrated and a quiet happiness becomes the default. Only from that place does anything truly good flow.
And certainly many critiques can be made of human history. Many valid critiques of American foreign policy can be made. We are not pure good.
But all those critiques have to be placed in the context of the whole of human history. By and large the Communist propaganda which teaches American kids to hate America is looking to Communism as the enlightened alternative, which of course is an exact inversion. Whatever our crimes, they are only a small, small fraction those of the Communists, and while our system can be amended and improved and evolved from within, such a thing is impossible in a Communist system, which amounts to nothing so much as a retrogression to the default mode of all human societies for the past 4,000 years, which had kings who made laws, and brutal men with swords and spears who enforced them, and in the name of the Good, and of God. Communists substitute History for God, and wind up in effect worshiping themselves but the practical effect is the same: the Party has a Divine Right to rule, and opposing it is opposing their God.