Quoted: Would society as a whole be better and more successful if it were structured and run like the military?
Would life in such a society be better and more fulfilling than it is now?
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Grand social engineering on the scale you speak of is a fundamentally flawed concept. In order to creat such massive changes in society, the government must necessarily assume greater and greater power. This power, however, eventually attracts the worst sort of people, and the system collapses. The perfect is clearly the enemy of the good in this regard, and the best one can hope for is divided power and just rulers.
The fact is that moral decay is an inevitable stage in the development of all great societies, and is due precisely to our limited natures. Eventually, the success of one generation leads to luxury. People growing up in luxury don't learn all of the hard-fought lessons that made the prior generations successful, no matter how good the educational system is. Fact is, most people learn things by hard knocks, and luxury shields people from hard knocks. This luxury then necessarily leads into moral decay. Or as the British say, sandals to sandals in three generations.
It happened to ther Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Spanish, French, Dutch and English, and it will happen to us as well. No system of government or social order is immune to the cycle of rise and decay. The goal, of course, is to delay the decay as long as possible. The Roman state lasted for roughly two thousand years in one form or another. Hopefully we can outdo them.