Plato's Cave and the Rise of the Highly Educated Radical

damnitbuilds

The "Free Press", freed: https://archive.ph/v16R3

alephnerd

India saw a similar issue in the 1970-80s with the rise of the far-left Naxal movement and the far-right Hindutva movement, and the political strife in addition to the collapse of the USSR caused led a country that was contemporaneously comparable to China in the 1980s-90s falling 15 years behind China by the 2010s. Entire generations of scholar-students ended up joining political movements, student politics degraded campus safety and cohesion, and society politicized to such a degree that state capacity degraded severely, and made most voters to view Singaporean and Malaysian (authoritarian) style "Asian Democracy" to be as a viable option. Heck, LKY, Goh Chok Tong, and other Singaporean policymakers mentored Narendra Modi back when he was CM of Gujarat. A similar transition is slowly happening in the US as well.

panflute

Personally I find it a little condescending to imply the highly educated shouldn't be more politically violent than average. Studying the history of political violence is probably not going to lead to a simple heightening of the 8th grade view that Gandhi somehow eliminated earlier methods because he proved the British Empire of a hundred years ago was especially susceptible to shame.

daymanstep

The author might want to look into elite overproduction theory. Same thing happened in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century. Most of the radical revolutionary groups had a core of highly dedicated and highly educated people. University students being the most radical and prone to revolution has always been the case. Elites revolt when they feel that they are getting a bad deal in the existing social order. This happens when the elites which are being produced cannot be absorbed into the existing social hierarchy. That's why unemployed students from elite universities - some of the most intelligent and capable in society, yet they have no income - are the most dangerous - because they have the most to gain from a successful revolution and very little to lose.