Journey-on:
"Can you imagine this! Please tell me you're jesting. You actually think stripping the genes that code for Dominance/Submission behaviors will create this "utopian" society you speak of! You actually think that such a manipulation will only affect that one layer of psychological behaviors toward that one specific social endeavor. How naive you are! You're probably all for forced abortions and limiting couples to one child, too.
Why not just create thousands of arcosanti projects where like minded people can come together and work toward specific goals and let natural evolution (survival of the fittest) deal with everybody else?"
Such a society would not have the means, at first, of making an altruistically enhanced human being. I would do what you just said in your last sentence and help to bring about the creation of thousands of Arcosantis made up of "normal" people. I put "normal" people in quote marks because I believe that many of those people who voluntarily join such a Society, in times of peace, are already possesed of the type of character, genetically predisposed, that would be acceptable. In times of of social collapse or near collapse though, these communities will be attracting both servile people that would cringe at your feet for a loaf of bread as well as congenital Psychopaths whom, if you've never known a real Psychopath in person, is pure evil, hides it well initially and is a real nightmare for those around him/her.
What I would do in the first stage of selection is to test with brain scans and other foolproof tests the people asking for admission to the community. We are already at the point where neuropsychologists with the right knowledge can find the portions of the brain that are inactive in psychopaths. I should add that every Society or Nation reserves the right to screen immigrants with tests that demonstrate fluency in their language, basic knowledge of their nation etc. We simply would be filtering out the undesirables.
The problem to that first step is that it cannot be relied upon for a solution throughout the generations. No matter how well chosen the original population is it will most probably regress to what the society before it was. Therefore it will be the mission of the society to engage in a solution that will make its population guaranteed to be tyranny free throughout the generations.
Since this Society, and I am referring to the collective arrangement of all communities, is a participatory democracy, it will perform these duties in the most humane way possible. A confirmed psychopath (they are believed to number around 2% of the US population) will be sterilized. Such actions do not have to be expanded to the population in general for whatever flaws they may have but I make no bones about sterilizing that type of person.
Nor will I promote other enhancements through eugenics such as higher intelligence until Dominance/Submission has been stripped and Altruism enhanced. The reason for this is that psychopaths and other undesirables will have an enhanced intelligence through which to perpetrate their crimes with.
Therefore these genetic alterations will not be a prelude to my society but the other way around. In any case we wouldn't be able to do much without an infrastructure, as the previous society would be in a state of collapsing. The communities will be the prelude to the transformation of the genetic sould of humanity.
Also, I am not as naive as you suppose. I know that genetics is as complex as the climate and simply fooling around with one set of genes is not likely to be a solution. As in present day science, experimentation can be done on small vertebrates like mice.
villabolo
PS: We have gotten way off subject and I apologize to frankiespeaking who started this thread. If you want to, Journey-on you could start a new thread on this subject. I'll be happy to respond to it.