I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
The problem isn't setting up a great system, the problem is what happens when charismatic leaders and people like Stalin turn up.
With tongue in cheek, that qualifies you as the "people like Stalin" category. Not a good idea.
I think it's important to point out that some people... don't seem to share the same ground-assumptions, and it's forming a rather sharp divide in modern US politics.
There's a model for analyzing "how could you think that" disagreements which I've found useful, from a (leftist) video essay:
> See, when you talk to our conservative friend, you operate as though you have the same base assumptions [...]
> Since we live with both of these frameworks [democratic egalitarianism, capitalist competitive sorting] in our minds, and most of the things we do in our day-to-day lives can be justified by either one, we don't often notice the contradiction between them, and it's easy to imagine whichever one tends to be our default is everyone else's default as well. [...]
> Your conservative friend thinks you're naive for thinking the system even can be changed, and his is the charitable interpretation [...] Many conservatives assume liberals [...] know The Hierarchy is eternal, that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them. [...]
I haven't had the time to read this series yet but I can recommend for example his articles about the industrial revolution, making of iron and steel or sieges in the Lord of the Rings compares to read world tactics.
He has a knack for analyzing society from a systems level perspective and going into the right amount of depth for somebody who wants to understand the principles without having any background in history.
10/10 couldn't recommend more.
I believe the Sparta series is the most popular, but I really enjoyed the one on iron.
_his_ blog. It’s all written by one man. But I agree that it’s a remarkable blog, so fascinating and freely given.
While I’m in grumpy-old-man-shakes-fist-at-newfangled-grammar mode, I can _almost_ accept that people writing in the “historical present” is unavoidable these days since TV historians have made it so trendy, but it’s especially jarring when he changes tense in the middle of a sentence (emphasis mine):
> These settlers _were_ remarkably well compensated, because part of what the Hellenistic kings _are_ trying to do is…
(Btw he's not a tenured professor, much to his chagrin, he's an adjunct professor. This is exactly why he wrote A LOT about broken academia system too.)