Quote History Quoted:
everything in life begins and ends as a story. STEM is merely the toolbox. the arts--all the different forms of storytelling, in all the different senses--are why we do what we do.
on a different note, as @Bohr_Adam points out, the USSR placed an overwhelming emphasis on STEM and were deeply afraid of the arts and humanities, because the technical guys were easy to control while the arts threatened the foundations of communism.
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I've started reading
The Gulag Archipelago, and Solzhenitsyn mentions that they eventually came for the engineers, workers, and tradesmen that didn't represent an ideological threat anyway.
The reason why was for the so-called "wrecking of industry" (i.e., not being able to meet the impossible demands of the state).
The intelligentsia were the first to be rounded up and sent to the gulag, though.