"Geopolitics" is a sanitized term for what great powers do, have always done and will always do. When you look at what it entails in detail, some of the things you'll see would make for great true crime television of the most gruesome kind.
This is what tends to happen under military occupations of foreign countries. It's sort of inevitable. There will always be some level of armed resistance using the general population for support or at least cover. Any sympathies soldiers in the occupying forces may have for the civilians of the place they're occupying tend to disappear real fast when they see something like a roadside bomb kill and maim their comrades. That's when the kidnappings, murders and torturing starts, which inevitably begets more of the same as the locals join the resistance in greater numbers as a reaction.
In this day and age, it's impossible to justify things like that by officially declaring the people in the occupied countries to be sub-human and depicting them as such in official propaganda as was customary around the world only a few generations ago. The sociopaths who run the most powerful countries in the world do not need such justifications themselves. To be an effective geopolitician one must have the psychology of a callous sociopath. But no country can remain powerful if its average citizen has the morals of a sociopath. The economy and all social structures facilitating normal, productive and pro-social behavior would crumble. The problem could be solved with something like scientific racism, which when trickled down to the level of the average person, would allow for him/her to think of all the violence perpetrated by one's own government abroad being done to some sort of half-animals who deserve what they get. But since that sort of thing is passe these days, it is necessary to resort to other options.
Among the ways to solve the problem is to allow the standards of education decay to a point where the population will be unable to oppose a war in some remote corner of the world based on humanitarian concerns or even the expense of it to them as tax payers because they don't even know such a place exists. The prevalence of anti-science attitudes and a pro-conspiracy mentality is a barometer of how bad the situation is in a society because those things flourish when standards of education falter.
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I don't have time to write out a full comment,soz but:
Psychopathy and sociopathy are not the same.
Sociopaths are more than capable of moral standards.
All psychopaths are sociopaths, but not all sociopaths are psychopaths.
Equating education and intelligence is disingenuous.
They are far, far, far, from the same thing.
The prevalence of anti-science attitudes and a pro-conspiracy mentality is a barometer of how bad the situation is in a society because those things flourish when standards of education falter.
This statement comes from a lack of intelligence.
Questioning everything is _the_sign of intelligence. (as opposed to authoritarian indoctrination and acceptance of whatever narrative is given by the authority(some call that education').
Intelligence is defined by questioning everything.
lack of intelligence is defined as not thinking for yourself.
This. According to people my age and how we word it is, " Who hurt you? ".