This misses a point.

> Trying to reform human nature through some sort of all-encompassing utopian project always and inevitably

... succeeds, when done via:

> Institutional protections formulated correctly

Culture seems to converge to incentives.

A good book is Pinker's Better Angles. There's a huge gap between:

a) 1000-era human nature, where Khan took an army and raped and pillaged a major portion of the world, and people looked up to him for it.

b) 2000-era human nature, where we're talking about things like harassment litigation, antitrust, unsafe products, and election fraud

Virtually every country in the world at least keeps up the pretence of a democracy. A pretence might not be a fair election, but is still a world away from the various sackings of Rome.