Communists always claim that everyone in a city or nation would be virtuous if only they (the Commies) could re-engineer society. This overlooks the fundamental truth that morality is not about social circumstances only, but also about human nature and Original Sin.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good.”
He continued, “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an unuprooted small corner of evil.”
Put another way, as the Bible would say, every man has the chance up until the end of his life to repent from sin (e.g., Mark 1:15)—but, unfortunately, also the chance to fall away from virtue. People can tempt their fellow men one way or another and circumstances can make sin more or less attractive, but ultimately each individual has to make his own personal moral choice.
Tyrants can force slaves to act a certain way out of fear, but no man can make another man good. That is a choice not only concerning exterior actions but also interior thoughts and passions. But this is precisely what socialists deny, partly because they don’t believe in the soul, and partly because they have a god complex.
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Communists from Russia to Britain to America have in the past and in the present sworn that if they could only seize the means of production, imprison or kill the wealthy, abolish religion, and redistribute wealth, society would be a perfect utopia of bliss. There would be no envy, no laziness, no greed, and no anger, because the supremely wise elites would have brought permanent equality to the world. Such a situation can never occur in fact, and even those who tried to do so on a small scale have always failed. Even the apostles, the best friends of Jesus, could not long keep new Christian converts sharing everything with each other before one couple became greedy and broke the rules (Acts 5:11).
Adam and Eve lived in paradise, and yet Satan was able to tempt them to sin with the offer of greater power and forbidden knowledge. There is no such thing as a perfect society or a human without some temptation, however, small. Even Jesus Christ, who, of course, never committed sin, did suffer temptation (Matthew 4).
So whenever a Zohran Mamdani or Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims to have found the perfect recipe for engineering a utopian society, don’t fall for the line. It is at heart the same lie that Satan told in the garden of Eden so many thousands of years ago. And it will always have just as heinous results as the very first sin did.
