What happens when engineers run the world?
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Quote:Analysing the backgrounds of 178 jihadis, Gambetta and Hertog found that 44 per cent had studied for an engineering degree – while engineers comprised an average of only 3.5 per cent of the male workforce in their home countries. Most of the standard explanations for this vast over-representation are no doubt familiar to diligent New Statesman readers: graduate employment across the Middle East is hard to find and, as Jean-Paul Marat could tell you, frustrated ambition is often a catalyst for radicalisation.
While that accounted for the preponderance of degree-holding jihadis, it did not explain the dominance of engineering. For that, the social scientists turned to what they called the “engineering mindset”. “Engineering is a subject in which individuals with a dislike for ambiguity might feel comfortable,” they wrote. According to a US survey, engineers were “less adept at dealing with the confusing causality of the social and political realms and . . . inclined to think that societies should operate in an orderly way akin to well-functioning machines”.
Quote:“Engineering is a subject in which individuals with a dislike for ambiguity might feel comfortable,” they wrote. According to a US survey, engineers were “less adept at dealing with the confusing causality of the social and political realms and . . . inclined to think that societies should operate in an orderly way akin to well-functioning machines”.The Zeitgeist Movement has inherited this mindset via Jacque Fresco who was a supporter of the Technology Movement in his younger days in the 1930s. It finds an echo in their call to "redesign society" and underlies their criticism of democracy as mere consultation of the ignorant and their belief that political discussion is unnecessary as there's only one solution to any problem to be left to experts in the field to find.
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