https://pushingrubberdownhill.com/2021/07/09/democracy-and-communism-are-natural-bedfellows/
Comment:
Democracy, Communism and Fascism are sons of the “Enlightenment”. This is why all of them end up in totalitarianism. It is in their DNA.
The Enlightenment is the cause: the rejection of an official religion means that “people will believe in nothing”, as you said. So people focus their lives in the material world (pleasure and money). The rejection of original sin means that men are naturally good, like Rousseau said. Since God is irrelevant and people are naturally good, it is logical to give them freedom (liberty). The only evil is in the institutions (Rousseau) and you can change these institutions by reforming the law.
Since there is no transcendent standard, every opinion is valid. This ends up in relativism and equality. Liberty and equality are entropic forces: they destroy every structure. Not only in the human realm. If all the parts of a biological cell behave the same (equality) and do what they want (liberty), the cell will end up dead. So liberty and equality are dissolving acids.
In short, the Enlightenment introduces all the concepts that rule the world today: liberty and equality. These dissolving acids destroy the personal conscience and organic communities (everything that is in the middle of the State and the citizen), because they go against “liberty” and “equality”.
So, without personal conscience and organic communities that impose social stigma, the only way to limit bad behavior is the the coercion of the State (the law enforced by the monopoly of force). So we end up with atomized individuals depending from the State, that is, from an army of bureaucrats controlled by an elite.
Communism is the fast version of this and democracy is the slow version of this. All the roads that start in the Enlightenment end in totalitarianism, by simple logic.