What I mean is basically obedience to authority plus willingness to please. When told to sit down and shut up you say "Yes, sir", sit down, and shut up -- and you like it. When told "Go do this" you go and do this. It's the difference between wolves and dogs.
Thanks for clarifying your position. I'll use the word "submissiveness" to refer to this if you don't mind.
All the people you describe are powerful, but cops and warlords have only limited ability to affect legislation in democratic countries. So I'll focus on rich people and bureaucrats.
Some thoughts:
The time horizon is long here... most people aren't sufficiently good at delayed gratification to plan on a 20 year timescale, and that's how long it takes for children to grow up. And then it takes another 20 years or so for them to be a large fraction of the adult population. That's half a lifetime.
More importantly, the classic hypocrisy scenario is when people are benevolent when a question is presented in a way that primes far mode ("Corruption is wrong") but somehow their preferences change when a short-term opportunity presents itself ("Man, I really need some money to cover my loans... I'll ask for a bribe just this once. It's not like I'm doing anything wrong really, just offering them the ability to accelerate their application.") Things that affect events 20 years out are more likely to prime far mode.
This plan has social desirability bias working against it. Joe Bureaucrat goes up to his colleague and says "Hey Liz, the citizenry will be far easier to subjugate 20 years down the line if we write submissiveness in to this new law." Mr. Burns steeples his fingertips and chuckles: "My portfolio companies will find themselves profiting nicely once everyone is a submissive little consumer who buys everything they see on TV." The perpetrators will need to coordinate with scientists in order to draft their legislation, and they'll need a plausible rationalization for why they're mandating submissiveness (rather than, say, other crime reduction options like altruism) in order to coordinate on the effort effectively.
In principle, any law passed regarding this would also affect the children of rich people and bureaucrats. So they'd either have to deal with the fact that their kids would also be submissive or find some way around the law, probably by traveling. Traveling could allow them to circumvent other restrictions too. One failure mode would be a society where most are trusting and submissive, but many foreign-born individuals are dominant and sociopathic. This could also arise if different countries had different restrictions and unrestricted immigration was allowed between countries. This gives every country an incentive to put at least some steel in the spine of their citizenry.
It's not exactly clear the degree of control we have here. Ultimately we're having this discussion in the hopes that our conclusions will be implemented somewhere and somehow... perhaps by scientists working on genomics, perhaps by some altruistically motivated lobbyist, etc. My guess would be that anyone advocating for legislation could also make it clear what the legislation shouldn't do, but it's possible that their control wouldn't be that fine-grained, and they'd find themselves initially pushing for legislation that they eventually didn't endorse.
By the way, I noticed that you've been a bit antagonistic and cynical during this discussion, with a strong "us vs them" type framing. I'm wondering if anyone (including you) has any thoughts on how I could have presented this issue in a way made it less likely to get politicized. It seems like once an issue gets politicized it's tough to un-politicize it. I have half a mind to delete my post for that reason; maybe a different discussion on a different day will turn out better if everyone just forgets about this one.
My worry is less bureaucrats, for some of the reasons you describe (delayed gratification is not a characteristic of bureaucrats), but well-meaning social reformers. You can find an unending stream of people who will tell you that doing X or even believing X is antisocial behavior and a portion of them will want the next generation to be genetically programmed to avoid X and do Y instead--for everyone's own good, of course.
I previously wrote a post hypothesizing that inter-group conflict is more common when most humans belong to readily identifiable, discrete factions.
This seems relevant to the recent human gene editing advance. Full human gene editing capability probably won't come soon, but this got me thinking anyway. Consider the following two scenarios:
1. Designer babies become socially acceptable and widespread some time in the near future. Because our knowledge of the human genome is still maturing, they initially aren't that much different than regular humans. As our knowledge matures, they get better and better. Fortunately, there's a large population of "semi-enhanced" humans from the early days of designer babies to keep the peace between the "fully enhanced" and "not at all enhanced" factions.
2. Designer babies are considered socially unacceptable in many parts of the world. Meanwhile, the technology needed to produce them continues to advance. At a certain point people start having them anyway. By this point the technology has advanced to the point where designer babies clearly outclass regular babies at everything, and there's a schism between "fully enhanced" and "not at all enhanced" humans.
Of course, there's another scenario where designer babies just never become widespread. But that seems like an unstable equilibrium given the 100+ sovereign countries in the world, each with their own set of laws, and the desire of parents everywhere to give birth to the best kids possible.
We already see tons of drama related to the current inequalities between individuals, especially inequality that's allegedly genetic in origin. Designer babies might shape up to be the greatest internet flame war of this century. This flame war could spill over in to real world violence. But since one of the parties has not arrived to the flame war yet, maybe we can prepare.
One way to prepare might be differential technological development. In particular, maybe it's possible to decrease the cost of gene editing/selection technologies while retarding advances in our knowledge of which genes contribute to intelligence. This could allow designer baby technology to become socially acceptable and widespread before "fully enhanced" humans were possible. Just as with emulations, a slow societal transition seems preferable to a fast one.
Other ideas (edit: speculative!): extend the benefits of designer babies to everyone for free regardless of their social class. Push for mandatory birth control technology so unwanted and therefore unenhanced babies are no longer a thing. (Imagine how lousy it would be to be born as an unwanted child in a world where everyone was enhanced except you.) Require designer babies to possess genes for compassion, benevolence, and reflectiveness by law, and try to discover those genes before we discover genes for intelligence. (Edit: leaning towards reflectiveness being the most important of these.) (Researching the genetic basis of psychopathy to prevent enhanced psychopaths also seems like a good idea... although I guess this would also create the knowledge necessary to deliberately create psychopaths?) Regulate the modification of genes like height if game theory suggests allowing arbitrary modifications to them would be a bad idea.
I don't know very much about the details of these technologies, and I'm open to radically revising my views if I'm missing something important. Please tell me if there's anything I got wrong in the comments.