Cancer (and anti-cancer immune systems) might be a very fruitful analogy. To fight the tendency of systems to fall toward a stable state of suboptimal selfishness and shallowness, it might help to explicitly punish self-promotion or explicitly reward competence.

Something like the former happened in America during the Progressive Era of the 1900s and 1910s, when racketeers and robber barons were thrown out of the offices they'd schemed their way into by a cadre of self-appointed elitist technocrats.

Something like the latter happened in the 1940s and 1950s, when IQ tests, the SAT, vast increases in education expenditure, cracks in the wall of WASP solidarity, and major construction and infrastructure programs put meritocratic engineers at the top of many corporations and agencies.