I think this is very true, but how do we organize a society around science? Science can tell us many important things, but it can’t necessarily tell us what we should value or what is moral. There are very intelligent, educated people trying to develop moral and ethical frameworks, using critical thinking and reasoning, but how do we ensure those frameworks become the basis for society? Even in a democracy, the people can choose to adopt those moral and ethical frameworks (assuming the people are even aware they exist), but they can also choose not to. Of course that’s true of any ruler, so I’m not saying that’s unique to democracy, but I’m just saying that democracy doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of rulers ruling unethically.
There’s technocracy, but for a technocracy to function, wouldn’t the technocrats need to have a fairly significant amount of power? I don’t necessarily think that technocracy is completely antithetical to democracy, but the technocrats would need the authority to override the people, whenever the people would try to implement some policy that was unscientific, making the technocrats, not the people, the ultimate authority.
Policies would be made by whom, though? The people, or democratically elected representatives of the people, can choose to make policies informed by peer-reviewed research, but they can also choose to ignore peer-reviewed research entirely. Here in the US it’s done all the time. Many of our politicians, and the people who vote them into office, often reject evidence and research based information that they find inconvenient or which runs counter to their world view.