I came across a Twitter account the other day of someone who described themselves as a Cuban American Communist. So someone in America (presumably from parents or grandparents fleeing communism) that is pro-Castro and pro-Cuba.
They were sharing images of nice houses in North Korea and China and of slums in the U.S. as a critique of “capitalism”.
The irony and hypocrisy of a pro-communist Cuban that chooses to live in the U.S. instead of moving to Cuba is striking, but it is something that I think communicates a lot about the world we live in today.
All around us we see people benefiting from the systems they claim to be victims of and working to tear down the structures that make everyday life livable. People are disconnected from family, community, and from traditional values, so they are grasping in the dark and trying to find that sense of meaning and belonging through ideology.
When you adopt a position like this, it allows you to feel connected to a small and tight-knit community, it allows to feel morally superior to almost everyone around you, it gives you a great deal of meaning, and it gives you a framework to understand and make sense of the world around you.
The communist lens isn’t the most useful or accurate lens, but it does help you make sense of some of the hypocrisy and evil that is committed by our corporatist and globalist governments and companies.
The way we reconstruct our society is not by arguing online with people like this, but instead by working to create meaningful connections within our families and communities, by helping others develop their ability to think about bigger questions in life, and by introspecting about what creates meaning for us early on at life.
When we don’t take these steps we raise children who very quickly become bitter, resentful, and jaded once they live the comfortable bubble of childhood.
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