"In the know" forgets about the hundreds of millions of lives ruined and lost due to collectivist ways of operation by some societies. Modern people all like to talk about communism. But in times where confucianist ideas was the philosophy adopted by the ruling class, the population would always suffer huge losses. This was especially true when dynasties changed. It was not a surprise for the new dynastical emperor to do a population count and find losses of more than seventy percent, sometimes in areas as high as ninety percent.

Folks like "In the know" like to live in their own heads and ignore reality. Such is why history gets repeated all too often.