Wow - this thread is huge! Good one Mark

I believe pretty much everyone is intelligent - it's getting them to use it (and to use it altruistically, at least sometimes) that's the problem.

I've often wondered about Capitalism in this context. This may be a naive, or cynical, thought but one of the reasons I think that Capitalism has become so ubiquitous is that it allows people to indulge in self-interested behaviour - rewards it, in fact.

It's a lot easier to be altruistic if you don't have to worry about how you are going to afford to feed your children this week. Capitalism, from my understanding of it, will always generate the "haves" and the "have-not"s even if the underlying "wealth" of a country is increased - the relative gap between rich and poor is necessarily maintained by the mechanisms that generate overall wealth. You only have to look at how many companies farm out to cheap overseas workers because the domestic workers are too expensive to see that. And hey, it makes good economic sense to do so - your stockholders will applaud you for that type of decision when you show record profit at your next AGM.

And even if you have a system specifically designed to eliminate this issue (eg communism), history has shown that human self-interest rises to the top of the heap and your "worker's paradise" turns into a totalitarian cesspool.

Perhaps the issue is not govt. in and of itself - perhaps it's a complex interaction between democracy, capitalism, and individualism??

James.