[sterlind]

You can be highly educated at engineering and still know nothing about politics or philosophy.

I think the best thing they can do is induce political apathy. Discourage people from trying to get into even the Party apparatus, except as functionaries doing repetitive, menial jobs, and then keep people prosperous so they don't question.

I've certainly known a lot of engineers - Western engineers, even - who didn't care about politics because they simply didn't need to.

[mlthoughts2018]

I don’t agree. To become highly educated in really any type of knowledge work, it requires a type of intellectual curiosity and openness to the scientific method applied to all possible policy decision making that is incompatible with the generalization you claim, at a fundamental level.

The drives simply can’t coexist in the same mind at the scale of a society. The drive of scientific inquiry required to be literate in almost all knowledge work is an incompatible internal drive against mindless acceptance of authoritarian policy.

[abandonliberty]

I once hoped the same thing for religion.

Unfortunately it's a misleading, nearly ethnocentric belief, like the one where we assumed wealth and prosperity results in democracy.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/03/01/how-the-west-go...

This is hubris. "Our model of society is optimal for scientific progress".

The recent Chinese diaspora are largely aggressively pro-china regardless of whether they are here as students or highly educated workers. Everyone who is not Han-Chinese a laowai, or "foreigner", even in their own country.

China is showing the world an alternative to Western democracy, and they can point to clear failures of democracy with populism, corruption, and white people's ridiculous inability to wear masks ;)

Which model will be more resilient when the sea levels start to rise?