Engineers as a group tend to be a bit cranky, insular, and pessimistic. There is usually some older white guy who will tell you all the reasons something won’t work. You normally shouldn’t build anything until this guy stops being able to find problems. All architects in the end depend on structural engineers to make sure their visions can actually be built.
Architects, on the other hand, seem to self select as “visionaries”, in the sense of seeing, ideally, innovative, unique ways of approaching the craft of creating structures, of in some respects sculpting space, of creating openness and enclosure where before there was mere emptiness.
As I have said before, the visions of leftists tend to be static. Like the ennumerated crimes of Sade in most of 120 Day of Sodom, they lack motion. The same basic themes recur. The dominant feel is not of a machine but a picture, one in which all the components are harmoniously interrelated.
Mao, in decreeing, say, for the Tibetans a crop which had not been tested in Tibet, and which was destined to fail, killing a million or more people uselessly, was not operating a machine, or modifying a machine. The machine had been operating successfully for at least hundreds of years and likely millenia. He did not ask the questions an engineer would ask. He did not look at all the things that could go wrong.
What he saw was a picture of happy, smiling Tibetans, thanking him for so brilliantly changing their lives for the better. He saw a static image. He saw a society in the same way that a building stands, unchanging.
He was a sociopath, obviously–whether congenitally or made so by an evil creed is irrelevant–but one whose principle fault was a defective mode of thinking.
Couple thoughts. I’m tired and perhaps disjointed, but this theme has been in my head a few weeks, and I thought it time to put it to bed as well.