"Personal unhappiness into grandiose terms"

Marvin Olasky, now a Christian and a conservative, examines the intellectual currents and his own "warped psychology" that started him down the path from existentialist to avowed Communist 40 years ago in 1968:

This would not be a dictatorship for personal gain, though, for the dictatorship is only the transitional stage required to eliminate capitalists and capitalism from the body politic. During the transitional period terrible things would be done, but shrinking from them would simply create more misery by prolonging the birth pains of the new era. Thus, more killing means less killing; more dictatorship means less dictatorship; war is peace and totalitarianism is freedom—all in the long run. Yes, communism led to much inhumanity or "sin," but it was sin going somewhere, sin that would wipe out sin.

Did I really believe this? I look back from four decades later and wonder—but that's what I started to argue at the time.

Read the rest here.