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Unless you believe in overlords or secret societies the quality of government is more or less a direct result of the ethical constitution of a society - at least for a sovereign nation.

The difficulty is that it is a collective phenomenon - as you can establish fairly easily by picking somebody from society X and embedding them in society Y.

Ofcourse there is no collective without individuals, so ultimately it is aspects of individually adopted ethical codes and behaviors that it is responsible for a poor collective organization.

A standalone computer that operates reasonably but is connected to other computers via a broken API's will lead to overall broken network operations.

There is also something we might call a society's "intellectual constitution", the collective ability to execute required changes, devise institutions and tools etc. But this is subordinated to the ethical dimension (where there is a will there is always a way).



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