I'm not really making an argument here for whether Democracy is good or bad. I'm just saying it is an example of a hierarchical structure, where the people making decisions at the top are supposed to be better suited to that role than everyone else, which is exactly what OP was after. I guess my purpose in posting was to try and highlight the difficulty in setting up such a system on a large scale. Who chooses what "wisest" is? How do you measure it? The system of voting just happens to be the most successful thing we've tried so far (at large scales). You've offered some alternatives which perhaps could work better, but they've never been tested at scale, so we don't really know. Who are your Big Brain Geniuses? How do we choose them? How do we avoid the roles being captured by bad faith actors? There are plenty of really smart people who are assholes, and plenty of people who perform poorly in standardized testing, yet are full of kindness and compassion.

Also I totally agree that Democracy doesn't work so well in some countries. For example, I think a failing of the US-style Democracy is that not everyone votes (unlike, say, Australia, where it is compulsory), but I didn't want to get into that as it is somewhat orthogonal to the original post.