All known ideologies and systems of belief can be grouped in two:
- Tradition-bound
- Forward-projected
Tradition
The tradition-bound people go about their life with their heads turned to the past. It gives them the guidance of a known path, the safety of tested-and-tried solutions, the moral code of long-existing beliefs and rituals. Future for them is the source of disturbance, uncertainty. The future is where enemies, misfortunes and death are laying in wait, to do away each of us, one after one—or, if we are not vigilant, everyone in one fell swoop.
Forward projection
The forward-projected people are the creatures of escape. The world, as they know it, is too boring, too ugly, too absurd. It’s in our power to change it to something more exciting, more beautiful, more sensible. Even the weakest and most insignificant among us still have the ability to tweak a little bit of it to the better, if we gather all imagination, magnanimity and the thirst for perfection everyone possesses.
Escape from the present
Communists are the most radical and action-oriented faction among the forwards-projected people. They do not necessarily believe that the past is only bad. Still, the present for Communists is little else but a swelling cesspool of our accumulated blunders, illusions and crimes, with some occasional gems of nascent meaning floating in the waste matter. The cause of making a better future out of the deeply flawed present requires an outright rejection of the past.
Class struggle
When the time for action comes, and the banner of revolution is raised high and visible for all, a lot of people strongly object to revolutionaries taking away their stuff and destroying their lives. The sheer logic of power struggle that comes with it, greatly amplifies the forward-projected worldview, and makes Communists even less inclined to preserve anything from the past.
“Take hostages, according to yesterday’s telegram. Make it so that for hundreds of miles around people take notice, tremble, know, shout: bloodsuckers and kulaks are being strangled, smothered. Report the execution. Yours, Lenin. P.S. Find more result-oriented people.”
(Vladimir Lenin)