Stop asking the market to look after collective interest. This is the job of the government. The ultimate effect of virtue wanking CEOs and corporate governance is to deceive people into thinking democracy is something that can be achieved by for profit organizations and that they can forsake the formal binding of collective interest through law. It's nice if people are nice but it is not a bulwark of the collective…
> Stop asking the market to look after collective interest. This is the job of the government.
That's the thing: our government, society, is simply an emergent, collective agent of individuals. If most people don't actually have in mind the importance of altruism, then the whole thing doesn't work:
(a) The government can't watch our every little move (as-is);
(b) The more the government watches us, the more risks we take with authoritarianism (even totalitarianism);
(c) Having everyone extremely social-good disinterested is extremely inefficient: you increase policing costs, legal costs, regulatory costs, it increases complexity arbitrarily and makes the whole thing grind to a halt (see highly corrupt cultures);
(d) Moreover, the disinterest becomes dangerous because even if the mission of the government were to steer social-good disinterested parties to somehow achieve collective good societies (whose success I question), a disinterested population doesn't care to vote for well-meaning politicians, and doesn't have the ethical and social understanding to make good choices in this area. And then when the whole culture is social-good disinterested, it's hard to imagine somehow all government workers would be magically pro-social angels, and not as corrupt as the rest of the population.
In conclusion, the entire backbone of a society is ethical enlightenment (of course, alongside other things like effectiveness, and ethical effectiveness). If individuals themselves are not ethically enlightened, no social good outcomes are possible, be it from governments, markets, or various organizations like non-profits and coops.
I think the market would be looking after our collective interest if this enlightenment was more widespread. And then we could better discuss mechanisms (and general structural innovations -- which I think are very important) to keep the few inevitable problem cases and unenlightened psychopaths from ruining it for the rest of us :)
In a way, societies are made of goodness (cooperation).