Who writes the rules

This may be an old theory, but it certainly isn't mine, can't remember where I came across it and it was fairly recently; but it was new to me, so I'll run with it.
The idea goes that in the old days it was the religious leaders who made the rules. It was all about absolute authority and follow these arbitrary rules or else. From there you got kings and the divine right and all that stuff.
Then the lawyers came along with ideas like "No, man has to make the laws for himself" and so you got things like the republic. The idea coming down to anyone who had the right education and connections could make the rules. Yes you had democracies and yes the population had a vote on who made the rules, (to prevent absolute abuse of power) but the general population was not viewed as overtly competent; more-so that like a legal system there were checks and balances placed in the system itself.
Now you've had Wikileaks and the proposal is that this is an attempt to apply scientific/engineering principles to the field of law. This was the new idea to me, so bear with me here. What science and engineering fundamentally say is that it doesn't matter who you are or what your education is, it doesn't matter as long as you are right.* Now this then leads to the concept that as long as information is freely available and debate open and free then the correct way to do things will be found. In fact the best thing people can do is collect data and publish it. It will occasionally cause upsets and disturb the status quo, but it all advances the state of the art.

To me this is an interesting thought, will you have a society that is ruled not by dogma, or a collection of rules debated by a subset of society but an honest effort to find the optimal behaviour for the species. I'm a big fan of Ian M Banks' writing particularly his Culture works and the anarchic society that is the culture. Not that I am an anarchist, I really don't believe that would ever work unless you have the post scarcity society that is the Culture and the benevolent god like puppet masters that are the Minds, but then at that point it's not really a human society anymore is it?
This is a concept that I've tried to explore in my own writings but it's really hard because I also have to first explore a society that is transitioning to a post scarcity society.
now all this is very tempting to try and work into my writings too, but they already becoming a tangled mess of complexity. I really should start publishing them and getting feedback...

Back to the point this is all about the evolution of the memes that that form society, potentially there are a set of memes and laws that form a society that is better than our own, but what are they. One or two very powerful men set out to give their opinion on that and you got religion. Then a greater mass of learned men tried to reason it out. Is the next step to open it up to public debate and iterative improvement?

No idea.


* "While the church knows no argument but force we know no force but argument" springs to mind. Fine there is definitely a hierarchy of respect within the scientific community, but at the end of the day if the lowliest school child came up with a demonstrable proof of anti-gravity, or some way to unify quantum mechanics and relativity then their status (hopefully) wouldn't matter, only the results.