Aaaaand I was 100% WRONG About China

[JasonBlack]

(08-27-2022, 09:13 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: One of the dangers to a despotic regime in modern times is that it needs a neurotic split between technological competence to support productivity to make a potent war machine, have seductive propaganda, and mollify people with a consumer economy while keeping people numbed on political issues. Thus for a modern economy it needs an educated workforce but people unwilling to challenge the numbing reality of the police terror, bureaucratic hierarchy, and numbing politics. An attempt to modify the order (think of Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika) to be more democratic is to bring to question the need for the political apparatus of the System.

If Founding Fathers of the United States said that a nation could not be both ignorant and free and supported mass education simply to make democracy viable, a sophisticated populace might be incompatible with a dictatorship. Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes that began with a generally well-educated populace had to degrade education to an elementary level except on technical skills, which explains such disparate tyrannies in Nazi Germany, Communist Czechoslovakia, Castro's Cuba, Pinochet's Chile, and Putin's Russia. Tyrannies that began with a largely-illiterate populace (Soviet Russia, Mao's China, Apartheid-era South Africa [for blacks]. Libya under Qaddafi, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein, promoted mass programs of literacy but made sure that people could not do subtle thought.

Even a study so apolitical as mathematics, mechanical entineering, or agronomy requires rational thought, and rational thought easily detects the inadequacies of fascism, Marxism-Leninism, and systemic racism. Tyranny depends heavily upon the argument of the appeal to fear (as in, obey the Ayatollahs or die horribly), but this fear degrades life -- and people know this well.

So far as I can tell, all tyranny entails contradictions which the system can never resolve. Government responsive to the People through free elections that accepts a free-wheeling intellectual life is far more competent at facilitating the creativity that underpins the economy of intellectual property (and the most advanced societies have it as a big player in the economy) of the post-industrial world. Orwell sees the ideal person to the tyrannical and exploitative order of his nightmarish Oceania as someone who can hold two contradictory ideas at the same time and see nothing wrong with that. Just consider that even in the United States, the communities that depend heavily upon intellectual activity for their active economies are less likely to support Donald Trump, and the people with the silly MAGA hats seem highly uncreative and unimaginative.

Contradictions do not harmonize; they conflict, and their conflicts often result in horrific conflicts in purges and wars. Something as basic as mathematics often resolves a question by establishing that the opposite idea is incompatible with more basic knowledge within mathematics.

This is all correct, but this it's largely coming from the perspective of human rights, quality of life, psychological health, etc. The stats I'm sharing here are more....this is why China will not exist in any recognizable form within the decade.