I dug up my old writing. I’m sharing it not because I think it’s good, but because it was where I first clearly formulated it:
“I suspect Buddhist civilization is messed up because it has no God. It has little folk gods, and sometimes they do like Catholics and treat buddhas like gods (Amida Buddha will instantly grant enlightenment if you say the magic words, like Jesus), but it has no God in the meaningful sense of a single locus of its spiritual life.
Buddhism promotes the same ethic of kindness as Christianity. It has rewards and punishments in its afterlives like Christianity. I think what it lacks is a sense of shame and a source of outside power. There’s a passage of a novel by a Chinaman that I love [The Three Body Problem] that muses about how to expect moral uplift from humanity is like expecting to rocket yourself up from the ground by pulling on your hair. It would take a force outside the human race.
Reminds me of this one, which is by a Black guy but sounds like rich, operatic White singing:
Add on that Buddhism also seems like a profoundly pessimistic faith whose goal is to find peace by detaching; its ideal is to die a final death. Desire causes suffering. I don’t think a Buddhist themselves would say it’s anti-love, but it’s a contrast from Christianity placing desire and all-consuming love at the center of its life, just directed towards its proper place, which is everywhere.
Which is more likely to motivate a person to try to do good, even if both SAY you should do good?
Then you add in Communism, a religion created by an angry little man that places humankind at the center of its own story. You are already perfect, society ruined you (somehow; nevermind that society is made of individuals and is what they make it), the world is a dog-eat-dog whirlwind of chaos and only what you see in front of you matters.
Those ideas alone would, even without all the degradation of totalitarianism, destroy a person.
So you take a people who have weak foundations, throw the grenade of Communism into their lives, and it’s no wonder that they wind up becoming absolutely vile. The main thing people who have gone to the Orient or to the post-Communist world always comment on is how selfish, cruel and self-absorbed everyone is, and there [China] you have all the worst of Orientals and Communists in one package.”