It's funny how the *desire* to believe that Communism has collapsed completely overwhelms the continuous flow of facts that tell us the exact opposite. The Bible diagnosed this flaw in our ability to reason thousands of years ago: "The heart is deceitful beyond measure, who can understand it?"
The desire to believe is most certainly a handicap where faith is misplaced.
I think the coup de grace for the Calvinists, particularly, as well as the Enlightened generally, was the infecting of otherwise moral minds with Pragmatism.
Once a person can rationalize as "good" evil acts done for "good intents" or judge a person by his motive rather than his actions, it's basically game over where Objective Reality or natural moral law is concerned.
Those are the People who've Eaten from the Tree marked "Knowledge of Good and Evil". They are the ones who think to practice the alchemy of pragmatism and transform good into evil and evil into good, depending primarily on ephemeral Circumstance and wholly subjective Motive.