ACTION

The dismantling of the existing political and economic institutions was intended to pave the way toward reliance on supposedly more effective, progressive, and fair methods of organizing society. Unfortunately there is no, nor can there be any such thing on Earth.”---Jonathan Daley

Nearly every ideology based on "the ends justify the means" produce a dictatorship which has advocated advance of the common good. The problem occurs when the dictatorship inevitably fails to inscribe its conceptions and designs within the framework of cultural and intellectual traditional processes.

Utopians (modern or not), laying claim to knowledge of the inner workings of human society unknowable to most people, aspire to create an always poorly defined general will in order to harmonize a new social order which requires behaviors human beings are incapable of sustaining(1).  The result being, as Karl Popper pointed out, is that their gnosticism veers into conspiracy theory and all the dysfunctional psychologies that develop. 

For example, Karl Marx, with no trust in individuals but having total trust in things he had no experience with, social forces which coalesce into institutional forces, claimed that Communism would lack middle class individuality, independence, freedom, private property, law, family, marriage, morality, philosophy, religion and patriotism.  Thomas Jefferson, by the way, thought the opposite. And look at what happened

In Marx’s footsteps and under V.I. Lenin’s leadership, Communists set about to impose on the largest, established, resource rich country in the world a dismantling of all the existing restraints on institutionalized and arbitrary power. In their place they established their own arbitrary, obtuse limits on individual and institutional freedom and autonomy, enforced with unlimited power a state-administered violence through a nation-wide gulag system, all the while proclaiming devotion to the universal common good with every step, and every life they took. Sending tens of millions of mostly their own citizens to a grave, for apparently their own good!

And since the Communist state is supposedly imbued with only good intent towards the common good, it could not be questioned, nor would anything but total loyalty, in deed and thought too, be allowed.

“Intentions need to be backed up by a careful and respectful study of the great works of political philosophy. The profound arrogance that attends those who willfully disregard the painstaking efforts and suffering of those who came before dooms their projects to failure or worse..to ignore such wisdom in pursuit of the common good forces an entire people into a Procrustean bed of one’s theory that will necessarily require dramatic coercion, and in any event will not succeed.”—Jonathan Daley

(1)  This is to be accomplished through a processes which creates a new kind of human psyche, which until this is accomplish (which would be horrific if one contemplates what this would mean in terms of results but, in reality will never occur), requires total state control of every aspect of human life.