"Also neglected, it should be added, are the benefits for the society as a whole of having members who are in control of the important areas of their lives. "
I agree with this perspective to an extent. I do believe that not everyone is capable of handling a certain amount of power. For example, I don't think I have what it takes to be the President of the Unites States for several reasons, so I could accept to let someone else be the Leader of the Free World.
As an alternative perspective, I could also join forces to eradicate our centralized government in effort to create a more decentralized form, giving more power and transparency to the people. With a decentralized type governance, the decisions of the majority will always be most favored, giving a "fair" structure that we dynamically create.
Both of these scenarios have a vulnerability for corruption though, because of mass population manipulation and our need for conformity.
I don't know the best approach to an absolute "fair" form of governance, which is part of the reason why I don't think I am fit to be the President. I do know that what we have now is not the correct answer, and that it is rapidly approaching a paradigm shift (whatever that may be). This is obviously a very complex thing to try and solve, which is why it seems that no country has figured it out completely yet. It will be interesting to say the least to watch how everything plays out.
In my post publish today, I tried to show that the ideology of conformity always work as an obstacle to the emergence of Utopias and lead to the acceptance of the forces of Power.
To me, conformity is a kind of voluntary servitude, where people abdicate of their "Importance".
This again is another great perspective of the whole picture and an excellent point of view. I have never really stopped to think potentially how detrimental conformity is to us a a species. If we removed the need for conformity from our genetic makeup, we essentially could be a near perfect species, granted we all chose to be good people, but that's a conversation about morality and how it can be so vastly different between people. What I think is right may be worlds different than what you think is right, which explains why we have never been able to create that Utopia some of us long for. Its an extremely complex thing we have going on inside of our DNA, and we still aren't even close to completely understanding it.