The Most Intelligent Society

[noxious]

I was just thinking about this last night and so I thought this would be the perfect place. Perhaps we could get two debates going. The most intelligent society today, and the most intelligent through history, in relation to it's time period.

Thoughts? Opinions?

[jabbahunt]

We are still a barbaric society in the fact that we have had 12yrs to figure out how to get Sadaam out of power and force is still needed.

[g-boy]

In history... if it existed (and I doubt it did), it would be Atlantis. Then again, I guess they weren't too smart if they didn't figure out their island was going to be swallowed by seismic activity and realize they should evacuate.
The Egyptians are up there... they had batteries damnit! It also depends on what you mean by intelligence... the Greeks and the Romans had some great thinkers, and in fact if the Library at Alexandria wasn't burned down during the Roman Empire, we could be far more advanced by now. So much information was lost, stuff that wouldn't come up again for centuries. But the Empire would collapse... they were barbaric in many ways, no matter how they looked at themselves... lotta corruption and other bad stuff. A lot of that is not controllable though. Democracy and Communism would both be great if either of them actually worked... unfortunately human nature makes it pretty much impossible. And don't say I'm dissing democracies, because the truth is there hasn't really been any true democracies in history... America is a republic, as are most "democracies" in the world. The reason is a true democracy means that everyone is equal, all have equal vote, all vote for the same thing. We have a system of federal, state, and local laws and such. Most of it is determined by legislatures. Athens was not a democracy... they had slaves... is that equality?
As for current societies... that's tough to say, it once again depends on what you mean by intelligence. Every country has its geniuses. We've got some smart people and great technology in the US. Personally I think it's the greatest country in the world and in history, but obviously it's a biased viewpoint. So I guess the answer is, I don't know.
Yeah yeah, I went on a bit of a tangent there, but I felt like saying it.

[Wha?]

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