[kahljorn]

"and it would have equally disasterous consequences when some damn fool made a weapon of it. "

Yea, somebody might make a time machine powered by bananas and rewrite the entire history of the world.

"I do believe the primitive society has gone away. We aren't having to fight eachother for dominance. While some people still have this mentality, overall we have a very structured society that focuses on a sense of equality and ethics. Ethics is essentially the aspect that takes us from primitives to intellectuals. "

Ethics is just an abuse of power as anything else. "According to my ethics, your ethics are unethical, now I will take over your country". Saddam, anyone? Religion is an extension of ethics, or vise versa, in many senses. Not that that has any relevance. Just commenting. An ethical battle may often be a battle of words but it gets results in one form or another, or a battle of religious fervor.
Remember highschool, or the bars? Dominance and submission are seen there by the common man, people arguing political points often are attempting to "Dominate" their opponent. Our election process is essentially a form of dominance. Everything has dominance and "Winning" in it. There's still plenty of wars, plenty of people mouthing off to eachother on message boards and plenty of politicians trying to fuck eachother over. All of it has to do with an internal dominance/submission battle.

"I disagree with society being in-between a physical and intellectual state. Society is made up of many different people who may be in any of the three states."

Right, society is made up of all these people. However, it mostly has an inclination towards material gain, often by means of intellectual pursuit or pursuit of an object derived from intellectual pursuit. On a whole, what is the greatest pursuit man has? Money and material possessions. That's a distinctly materialistic focus. If society goes through the same states, then each one should have an identifying marker of some kind (like the state of society) and I highly doubt the focus of emotional-being would have anything to do with someday owning a corvette. Also, often times the way to identify someone has to do with class; class has to do with money or material possessions. Now a days you also notice people judging people by intellectual means as well.
There are of course people outside the scope of what I'm saying, I'm just talking on a whole. The majority of the world.

How many third world countries are there with a rich upper class and a poor lower class? Exactly.