So I take it you found a side of the top down vs bottom up idea (elites, "the cathedral", X is downstream of X where X is politics or culture, great men of history, NPCs, maslow's hierarchy... being concepts pondered in that one). Each have compelling notions in them, and more generated as we understand more about psychology and genetics but can't get to anything like settled for me.This is already flawed as a basic concept because every government does this. They set what the subject matter is for the nation because they were influential enough to be elected to lead the country. They genuinely have a fondness for staying in power and convincing the population that it is the correct path.
What do you expect? You have to build a foundation to your concept by setting what the subject matter is. Tons of websites started as one thing and are a completely different sector or business venture today.
While I have a fondness for seeing philosophies of the past that led to successful empires, I find that to be a waste of time for future applications because the greatest empires of today are failing and they are more advanced than anything in an old book.
Population size is the biggest hindrance to those old philosophies. They weren't imagined for the world's size today.
Rigid systems will probably fail but not sure what that has to do with this. I would advocate for the pick and choose approach as well, if we are continuing with the quasi military/martial arts idea then jeet kune do would be the thing to point at.
As far as genuine fondness... so I did engineering in school. Ratios of males to females was about as skewed as you expect. The female contingent had three broad categories -- the hyper ra ra I can do anything a man can do set, the STEM is where the money is at set and the vanishing few that actually liked it/were just as likely to be pulling something apart to see how it worked as any man there (which was basically every man there). I felt sorry for the former two groups actually for while they could do the up until 2am design sessions, labs and whatnot they still got to lag behind the others that did it because they felt a genuine drive to do it. Something similar applies in games and discussion thereof -- you could memorise the list of times, dates, top 100 by genre/console/mechanic/region generally, earliest examples of mechanics, hidden gems and whatnot and effect something like useful responses but if you are up against one that does all that "naturally" (never mind actually plays things, hacks things to be better, figures out modes of play that are fun/makes their own fun and is generally inclined to get up and do it all again the next day) you are most likely going to lose, doubly so if the naturally one grabs in this case enough game theory to explain the underlying mechanics and logic/rhetoric to do the argument thing (sadly a somewhat lacking skill in the modern world).
Population size... still seems to be enough land, especially if more optimal uses are found. To that end we are probably still in the water production, food production and maybe energy production limitations just like they were ? thousand years ago. Most philosophies that survived into the written word being way above the human biological limit of Dunbar's number/nothing beyond the horizon/can't count past three.