Guy at work always ranting about the government being incompetent and unnecessary while his hand typically rests on a mouse which was first developed at a government-supported institution and all the while he’s using a computer with technologies largely developed by government research. As he’s whining, the company he works for is providing customers services on a globe-spanning network that we now know as the internet but was first called Arpanet because it was developed by — you guessed it — a government agency.
Cluelessness is a bottomless abyss apparently. Literally this person’s entire career, every economic good that has ever occurred in his life, has come about because of some government-sponsored invention.
I can’t explain any of this. No psychological theory is adequate to reduce this to something comprehensible. How have humans survived this long with brains that work so poorly?
Well, that won’t last. Surviving, that is.
I don’t know. Perhaps for the same reason so many IT guys are libertarians? You’re assuming he’s even cognizant of all the facts you mentioned. I’m sure it would be damaging to his sense of identity to acknowledge any of it or rejected as not enough of a proximate cause for the economic goods he’s experienced and the career that he has.
Most IT workers I’ve known do not and have not read broadly, and they do not and did not have wide ranging interests.