In the age of automation, ideology is no longer a theory debated in books; it becomes the air people breathe. Factories hum with robots, data streams flow faster than thought, and entire industries vanish in a single software update. The question is no longer if people will be displaced, but how societies will absorb the shock.

Hollowed Out Education in the West

In the United States, education has been hollowed out by decades of underfunding and commodification. Schools run on debt, universities feed corporate machines, and teachers burn out under the weight of standardized testing. The scientific base that once sustained American innovation no longer regenerates itself from within.

Instead, the U.S. has relied on immigration: waves of talent from East Asia, India, Russia, and the Middle East. Without this steady inflow, the American scientific project falters. Knowledge was borrowed, not nurtured. And now the borrowing is running dry.

East Asian Collective Striving

Meanwhile, across East Asia, the approach is different. The emphasis is not on the market’s invisible hand, but on a visible, collective striving: infrastructure that anticipates population needs, cities built to inspire rather than decay, and a cultural respect for engineers and scientists as national assets.

In this model, automation does not signal social abandonment. It is absorbed into an economy that finds ways to retrain, reassign, or stabilize the lives of ordinary people. The guiding principle is not survival through obedience but stability through cohesion.

The Scientist’s Dilemma

So where will tomorrow’s scientists retire?

In the U.S., the image is bleak: the “dumpsters of Lost Angels” — tent cities growing in the shadows of billionaire towers, decaying infrastructure, fragile healthcare systems, and a culture that once admired scientists but now treats them as disposable specialists. Even those who “made good money” in their careers cannot be certain of a dignified end.

In East Asia, the counter-image emerges: futuristic cities with stable healthcare, efficient transport, and a sense of social continuity. A place where a lifetime of labor in knowledge fields is met not with neglect but with infrastructure designed to sustain.

The Oligarchs’ Escape

There is another irony. Oligarchs in the West — those who spent decades exploiting populations, closing factories, draining wages, and tightening obedience — already plan their own escape.

They extract wealth from broken systems, then purchase their paradises elsewhere: villas in Singapore, high-rises in Dubai, islands under East Asian suns. They retire not in the “freedom” they praise but in the stability they deride. They curse collectivist societies as threats, yet quietly seek the order and security those very societies create.

Real paradises, it turns out, are not tax havens or gated estates. They are futuristic social countries, built on collective striving, where a citizen — or even an outsider — can walk the streets without fear, grow old with dignity, and know that the lights will stay on tomorrow.

Summary

When the time comes that scientists no longer wish to waste their lives chasing only money in imperialist tyrannies, they will simply stop coming. Money is not everything. Families, children’s education, dignity, and safety matter far more. And in that moment, the empire will find itself rich in dollars but poor in minds, while the real future is built elsewhere.