To say that as recently as much of the last century our society was "employing the best talents irrespective of nationality, race, religion or gender" you'd really have to stretch the truth to breaking point. If you go further back than that...

Yes, "our system" has roots which go back hundreds, even thousands of years, and you can find pointers towards that kind of things way back in history, along with pointers towards quite other things.

But you don't need to go back far at all to find a culture where women were very restricted in all kinds of ways, even required to wear veils in public, when married woemn had no property rights whatsoever, when black people were repressed or even enslaved, people were excluded from jobs on the basis of their religion.

And our flexible system doesn't always change for the better - it didn't take long for Germany to descend from a kind of relatvely liberal capitalism into what was probably the most evil society that this planet has known.

My point being, we can't afford to feel safe and smug about ourselves. We are quite capable of destroying ourselves, and of destroying what is good about ourselves. We nearly did in the last century.