Epicureanism = philosophy + practice + education
Epicureanism was much more than just another set of thought patterns to chat about the world.: besides the theoretical general world view (“Physics”), epistemology (“Canon”) and ethics it encompassed the daily communal practice of its tenets. The community members went through and education process to learn how to act and speak honestly and in harmony with their teachings (“parrhesia”), how to control their desires, how to manage their self-sufficient communities. For 800 years.
The philosophy of Marx and Engels, on the other hand, as interpreted and implemented by Lenin and his followers substituted the greed for money with the greed for power and served as “philosophical and scientific” foundation for the most oppressive and hypocritical communist regimes of almost half of the world for more than half a century.
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Why the unrelated and unprovoked attack on socialism?
If you knew anything about Cuba, you’d know it has one of the highest measures of “gross national happiness” than any other former colonial country. Not to mention world class and universally free health and education. Surely an Epicurean would agree with that?
Epicureans do not attack political systems and the cannot be provoked to do it, either.
I have never attacked “socialsm” as such. I have seen it being practiced in a decent and rational way for instance in Sweden, where the people democratically chose it as a system, and legitimate it periodically by reelecting the socialist party. I did not have any choice in Ceausecus’s Romania to recall privileged power-greedy party bosses. What are as your choices in Cuba? Do you have a division of power? Do you have alternative political parties? What is the content of free education? Are you educated to think critically? Is your health care system not ridden by corruption as the ones I knew in Romania and Hungary? Are your need for self-determination being satisfied?