"People learn to say things they do not believe so fluently, and for so long, that they lose access to what they actually think."
Mental Communism – How to Recognize It.
You don't need a party card to be a communist anymore. You don't even need to have read Marx. Mental communism is not an ideology. It is a way of thinking – and you meet it every day: in the office, in the newsroom, at the dinner table, in the ministry.
Here is how to recognize it.
1. Words before things. Rename a problem and it's solved. Insecurity becomes "a feeling of insecurity." Rioters become "youths." Censorship becomes "fighting disinformation."
2. Intentions before results. A policy is good because it means well and sounds good. That it failed is a detail – usually someone else's fault.
3. Humanity before people. He loves humanity. He can't stand his neighbor.
4. The model before reality. When the world doesn't fit the theory, the world must change. A new law, a new program, a bigger budget.
5. An enemy for every failure. The plan never fails. It is sabotaged – by the rich, the speculators, the "far right," the weather.
6. Appearances before reality. Poses before acts: the flag in the profile picture, the slogan at dinner, the open letter signed with a hundred others. Then nothing.
7. Rights for me, rules for you. Free speech for his side, "hate speech" for yours. Private schools for his children, public ones for yours.
8. He never pays. Being wrong costs him nothing – he moves on to the next cause, the next post, the next promotion.
9. Consensus instead of evidence. "Experts agree." "Studies show." "Everyone knows." Ask which study, and you become the problem.
10. No exit. Ask him what would prove him wrong. Silence – or outrage.
Poles recognize it instantly. We lived inside it for forty-five years: the meetings where everyone knew and nobody said, the newspapers reporting record harvests, the slogans on the walls. The regime only partly fell. The habit stayed. And in the West, it never even needed a regime.
What unites all ten? One thing. For the mental communist, reality doesn't exist – only his wishes, his words, his poses, and the power to impose them. Every sign is the same gesture: putting something in reality's place. Words instead of things. Intentions instead of results. A model instead of the world. An enemy instead of a mistake. A pose instead of an act. Consensus instead of evidence. That is also why he never pays and never admits he was wrong: you cannot be wrong about a world you don't believe exists.
Like children living in their fantasies. Children believing that wishing makes it so – except these children have power.
The good news: a habit of mind can be broken. It starts with one sentence, said out loud: the world doesn't work like that.
https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2113305092078137466?s=20
Mental Communism – A Definition
Mental communism (noun): a state of mind in which reality no longer exists. Only wishes, words, poses – and the power one wants to have.
It goes beyond the lie. The liar knows the truth and hides it – he still needs reality, if only to avoid it. The mental communist no longer needs reality at all.
What exists for him:
His wishes – how the world should be, which he mistakes for how it is.
His words – which, he believes, change the world by being said. "My truth."
His poses – the look of virtue, worn for others.
At best, his models of the world – which don't work, because they are incoherent.
And power – the only thing he takes seriously, because it lets him impose the rest.
Coherence doesn't matter. Not between his words and reality – and not even between his words themselves. Abolish the police – and why didn't the police protect us? Tax the rich – and why are the rich leaving? Free speech for us, "hate speech" for you. Orwell had a word for it: doublethink – holding two contradictory beliefs at once, and accepting both.
Communism the regime partly fell in 1989. But mental communism never needed the regime. It needs only a place where reality cannot send its bill: the university, the newsroom, the ministry, the NGO – and the wealthy quartiers of Paris, where the bureaucrats never pay for their mistakes and their children never face reality.
There is a simple test. Ask: what would prove you wrong? The scientist has an answer. The engineer has an answer. The mental communist has none – because for him, nothing is real enough to contradict him.
The cure is contact with reality. And reality is patient. It always collects – sometimes through a shop window.
Communism was a regime. Mental communism is a habit of mind. Regimes fall. Habits have to be broken.
What the West Still Doesn’t Get It:
Communism’s True Core: The Systemic Lie
Most people in the West think they understand communism. They picture bread lines, gulags, failed five-year plans, and the collapsed Soviet Union. They treat it as a discredited economic theory – an experiment that proved that abolishing private property doesn’t work. Case closed, history moved on.
This misunderstanding may be the most dangerous intellectual failure of our time.
Communism was never primarily an economic system. Economics was the surface. Beneath it lay something far more insidious: a total, systemic, institutionalized commitment to lying. Not occasional dishonesty. Not spin or propaganda in the ordinary sense. Something deeper – a civilizational war against truth itself, waged through every institution, every classroom, every newspaper, every conversation, until reality itself became negotiable and the lie became the air people breathed.
The Words We’re Missing
The Polish language, forged by decades of living under this system, produced words for this phenomenon that English simply cannot match:
Zakłamanie [zah-kwah-MAH-nyeh] – a state of total, pervasive, socially embedded falsehood, a condition in which an entire society is saturated with lies so thoroughly that truth becomes almost inaccessible.
Obłuda [ob-woo-dah] – a deep, performative hypocrisy, the gap between what is proclaimed and what is actually practiced, the mask worn so long it begins to feel like a face.
These are not words for individual liars. They describe a system – a mode of social organization built on organized mendacity, where the lie is not the exception but the foundation. English has no single word for either concept, and that linguistic gap is not a coincidence. It reflects a gap in experience. Cultures that did not live under communism lack the vocabulary because they lack the wound.
And because they lack the vocabulary, they struggle to recognize the thing when it reappears in new clothing.
The Continuity: Communism, Leftism, Wokeism
What we call wokeism today, or the broader radical left, is not a new phenomenon. It is the same operating system running on updated hardware. The specifics have changed – instead of the proletariat, we have marginalized identity groups; instead of bourgeois class enemies, we have racists and transphobes; instead of socialist realism, we have DEI statements. But the deep structure is the same.
That deep structure is this: truth is not discovered, it is assigned. Reality is not something to be understood honestly but something to be narrated strategically. Language is not a tool for communication but a weapon of power. And anyone who resists the approved narrative is not simply wrong – they are dangerous, and must be silenced, shamed, or destroyed.
This is zakłamanie in its modern form. This is obłuda wearing a human rights badge.
The same movement that insists men can become women will insist, with equal fervor, that questioning this is an act of violence. The same institutions that claim to champion free inquiry systematically suppress dissent. The same people who invoke tolerance as their highest value are among the most intolerant forces in public life. The contradiction is not accidental – it is structural. It is the system working as designed.
Why the West Still Doesn’t Get It
People who grew up in freedom tend to assume, at some level, that bad actors know they are lying. That somewhere behind the ideological performance, there is a cynical operator who privately acknowledges reality. This assumption is wrong, and it is why Westerners consistently underestimate what they are dealing with.
The totalitarian lie, at its mature stage, is not cynical. It is believed. Or rather, it creates a condition in which the distinction between belief and performance collapses entirely. People learn to say things they do not believe so fluently, and for so long, that they lose access to what they actually think.
This system does not just produce liars – it produces people who can no longer clearly distinguish truth from the narrative they have been trained to emit.
This environment also produces a kind of cognitive adaptation often described as doublethink – the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time, and to accept both as true when required. It is not merely lying to others, but a learned internal tolerance toward contradiction itself, where inconsistencies are tolerated because survival depends on it.
Literally twisting the minds.
Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and others who lived through this recognize the pattern immediately when they see it in Western institutions today. The show trials of Twitter mobs. The compelled speech. The ideological litmus tests for employment. The memory-holing of inconvenient facts. The ritualistic confessions of privilege. To a post-communist eye, it is unmistakable.
To eyes that have only known freedom, it looks like a passionate, if misguided, social movement.
That gap in perception – between those who have vocabulary for zakłamanie and those who do not – may be one of the most consequential fault lines in the Western world today. Because you cannot fight a disease you cannot name. And you cannot name what your language was never built to describe.
The first task, then, is translation – not just of words, but of the lived understanding those words carry. The lie is not a bug in this system. It is the system. Until that is understood, the West will keep arriving, perpetually surprised, to find that the institutions it trusted have been quietly hollowed out from within.
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