This seems to be a common feature of thinking aimed at the governance of groups -- "if everyone would just follow these uniform mores, everything would work out well!" Well perhaps so, but if you haven't noticed, that's not happening. Exhortation would appear to be fruitless. Making group decisions and deciding on group governance is not a process well modeled by gas laws (treating all the individuals as interchangeable and with simple inter-personal mechanics), even, perhaps surprisingly, for quite large groups of people.

I'm not sure what the technical terms are, but I even wonder how applicable lessons from smaller groups are to larger ones. For instance, countries are heterogeneous groups of people with largely involuntary memberships. (You can't just declare that you're not bound by a country's decision-making process, and conversely, the country can almost never just kick you out.) The sanctions available to countries, then, are radically different from those available to smaller groups which are more homogeneous (at least in some dimension) and have voluntary memberships, and from small groups like families which are genetically related. Do many lessons from families apply to corporations, clubs, or churches? Do the principles of organization of these kinds of communities apply well to countries? At first glance, it sure doesn't seem so. Even if there are principles of human psychology which apply to all these regimes, it seems more than just plausible that they manifest quite differently in different types of organizations.

Informally, quite a bit of the thinking on this topic that I'm aware of without digging in very deeply seems to be aimed at figuring out how to make country-level governance operate as an extension of smaller homogenous-and-partial group dynamics. That is, the idea is that there should be some kind of proper subset of the country, which is easier to think about in terms of the dynamics of voluntary and partial group processes, and which should be in charge of making decisions that bind the whole country. The thinking is mostly about establishing the composition and selection and size constraints on this group. That is, the theory is that if you can figure out how to specify "the perfect ruling elite" with just the right rules of behavior on it, then it will be appropriate to vest governance of the whole in that body.

Whether you are a royalist who thinks direct personal ownership of the country by a bloodline of monarchs is the optimal elite, or a republican who thinks that a set of rules specifying the operation of some sort of legislative body is correct, I wonder why we seem to be so drawn to this way of thinking. What evidence is there that this is the best (or even a good) way to do governance at the level of a country?