Crinkly ponders

How is it that whatever form of governance mankind tries, however well-meaning, however butressed by philosphical thought, almost like the law of entropy the initial state gradually evolves toward a stratified condition where power is gained by the few and exercised at the cost to the many?
We are assured that our politicians went into the representation business with the purest of motives, and now we've seen the degeneration that has overtaken so many of them. That the morality expressed as "I acted within the rules" (the Nuremburg defence) seems acceptable to so many of them may perhaps be traced to the high percentage of them trained as lawyers rather than as moralists. (As Robert Burns' Tam o'Shanter perceived, "Lawyers tongues turned inside-out as black with lies as a beggar's coat.) But then, what about the Roman Catholic priests, nuns, found on such a scale to have been guilty of child abuse? Surely one ought to have been able to reckon on high moral standards from them with their vaunted Christian beliefs?
The ancient Israelites got fed up with the sons of their prophet Samual "who did not walk in his ways, but turned aside after gain; they took bribes and perverted justice". So they clamoured for a king like the other nations but were warned by Samuel that a king would take what he wanted and they would end up as his slaves.
From Luther's reformation, via the Cromwellian overthrow of the divine right of kings, to the French Revolution and the reign of terror, the twentieth century attempts at communism, we see the same degeneration of high principles down to overt exploitation. Perhaps the most disappointing has been the American experience that, starting from the high principles enunciated by the likes of Thomas Paine in the Rights of Man, has spiralled down to the neocons and GWB.
To quote again from Burns, in his epitaph on Lord Galloway, a grasping landowner, "Bright ran thy line O Galloway/Through many a far-famed sire/So ran the far-famed Roman Way/So ended, in a mire."
Somehow, we need to find a way of evolving social progress that does not involve these repetitions of high expectation followed by degeneration. Such an approach was suggested by Karl Popper in "The Open Society and its Enemies", spelt out further by such as A J Ayer and others, explored in "Towards an Open Society", a seminar organized by the British Humanist Association as long ago as 1971 and even more relevant today after the intervening disasterous Thatcher-Blair periods.
But where is the political will and what political entity would come forward to press this case? Like so many today, I personally feel effectively disenfranchised because there is not going to be anyone representing these views for whom I can vote.
Crinkly