what makes you sure that a society that tied status more closely to such skills wouldn’t have promoted someone better than Mao to the top?
There have been enough revolutions and (temporarily successful) peasant revolts to demonstrate how that usually turns out. Lenin famously said that “Any cook should be able to run the country” and I don’t think it worked well.
populism seems anticorrelated with both good aesthetics and good science
Thus, by “a society that tied status more closely to such skills”, I do not mean the typical conditions leading to, and resulting from, a peasant revolt.
It’s more complicated :-D Like in French, most Russian nouns have masculine or feminine gender and IIRC in the original Russian the cook was specifically a female cook. And Lenin, sigh, was a cishet white male.
There have been enough revolutions and (temporarily successful) peasant revolts to demonstrate how that usually turns out. Lenin famously said that “Any cook should be able to run the country” and I don’t think it worked well.
As I said above,
Thus, by “a society that tied status more closely to such skills”, I do not mean the typical conditions leading to, and resulting from, a peasant revolt.
If only someone had thought to send Lenin to cookery school.
It’s more complicated :-D Like in French, most Russian nouns have masculine or feminine gender and IIRC in the original Russian the cook was specifically a female cook. And Lenin, sigh, was a cishet white male.
If https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin is to be believed then it’s more complicated still because what Lenin actually said was exactly the opposite.
A meme necessarily looks better than the actual source :-/