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What makes you so sure of this? More to the point, what makes you sure that a society that tied status more closely to such skills wouldn't have promoted someone better than Mao to the top?
The point here is to get into the reasons why intellectual climates have the properties they do, with respect to the ability to develop and identify true theories.
To be sure, societies could have multiple failure modes, and I am open to the possibility that the USSR and Maoist China may have been bad for reasons entirely unconnected to the relationship between status and physical cognition. However, the populist character of both makes me doubt this, as populism seems anticorrelated with both good aesthetics and good science.
There have been enough revolutions and (temporarily successful) peasant revolts to demonstrate how that usually turns out. Lenin famously said that "Any cook should be able to run the country" and I don't think it worked well.