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Let me get this straight: to rationally guide our society we must erase or deny self-interest?

KJacob asks the perfect question. How can you ensure all will buy into the 'common interest'? What sort of social engineering do you propose that would eliminate cheaters?

Also: who or what determines the common interest? A leader? A vote? Isn't that more or less what our system does now? I believe that you'll never get consensus from 250 million people. Differing ideas for the direction of our society will always exist, no matter what rate you phase in change.

If you want a society open to changes in beliefs than you must allow these differing ideas not only to exist, but you also must give each a chance to flourish. Only then will they become strong enough to challenge the dominant paradigm. You must encourage contrarian ideas knowing that they might replace currently held beliefs.

You say that a grand Utopian scheme is out of the question, and yet, if you're going to institute unidirectional piecemeal change there must be a guiding plan. If there's no Utopia at the end of this process, then it must be an eternal open ended quest. Therefore you must be willing to allow contrarian ideas take the reins and guide society when they attain popular support.

In such a situation, you might have a society that, in a time of scarce resources, draws closer together and realizes the benefits of group strength. That society might pass laws that redistribute income. Later, as resources become more available (due maybe to weather, overseas political climate, freak accident... who knows?), the society may realize the great advances possible when it's individuals are not hampered by the old system and are more free to act in self-interest. It might retract the laws that redistribute income.

And each state of that society, one more socialist, one more libertarian, must later be judged in your system to determine which was 'better', right? But you've already established that beliefs are to be relative and open to change, so the definitions of 'good', 'better', and 'crappy' also become relative. There goes any sort of scientific, or rational, study of the experiments. The quality of the social engineering experiments would be judged by whatever group holds political or social power. And when their beliefs are toppled by another group, the second could then draw new conclusions. 'Good' is now 'bad'.

Again, I ask: isn't this more or less what we have now?

I agree we need to encourage contrarian ideas and I don't believe piecemeal social engineering is unidirectional.

Is this essentially what we have now? I don't think so. We have plenty of folks who know how to obstruct justice, how to derail inquiries they are uncomfortable with, to block research they disagree with. And I guess I disagree that if one gives up the notion of a definite destination towards which are heading, one gives up any notion of rational evaluation and criticism. I think we can improve scientific theories without having any idea where the next improvement will take us. This is because creative breakthroughs in science, and institutional reforms, require imagination. Quantum theory ands relativity theory, for example, did not represent a small or obvious step in advance of the physics we were working with since Newton. It represented a large imaginative break with some crucial assumptions Newton made. But the new theories are more powerful, and do a better job of explaining and predicting the facts. So they are better.