System and Human Nature

Now, I'm so convinced that: the good / the bad of a system will bring out the best / the worst of human nature.

I'm not trying to say that people in a good system behave well, and people in a bad system behave badly. That would be too obvious. What I'm trying to say is that the trait of a system would have this amplifying effect on the people in it. An inch worth of difference of a system will result as a mile worth of difference in the nature of its people. Why is it so?

I hope you have read about Richard Dawkins's theory on Meme and Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (and you should if you haven't. Here are some links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins#Meme http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy). Let's look at human natures as memes, and the system as the environment these memes compete in. When there is a tiny change in the system environment. Some meme would gain some tiny advantage over its rival meme. (It doesn't really matter which meme is good and which is bad. The memes themselves won't care. They just replicate.) What matters is the meme in advantage will result in a slightly higher percentage in the people of the system than its rival meme. But it doesn't just stop there. Same as genes, most of memes are self-reinforcing, which means the more they present inside the memes pool, the more help they will get from one another, and the more advantage they will have over their rival memes. (If you can’t visualize this, just imagine when was the last time you heard of a widely spread religion advocating “we should all believe in some other religion”? As a meme, it just can’t survive. ) This will become a self-propelling upward spiral, which will eventually snuff out the rival meme, or reduce it to an insignificant proportion.
A change of a few centigrades could kill dinosaurs! A slight tilt of a system’s environment will result in a land-slide in the kind of characters the people in it display. So it is not about educating people to think or behave a certain way; it’s all about making small system changes that would nudge people to the right direction, (or the direction you want them to be in).