Posted by Once upon a time in the depths of a far away galaxy, there was a planet. This planet happens to harbor a good number of sentient beings, each of them fully aware that the resources on the planet that can be utilized for its own survival are finite. Now, how does one go about allocating these resources among the population? Well, let’s leave these sentient beings to their own faculties and see how things pan out.
Hm, interesting.
It looks like during the commotion, a fierce competition took place and what looks to be a social hierarchy of some sort had taken shape. Peace had once again returned to the land and the lion’s share of the resources went to the strongest, the most physically fit, and the most intrepid of them all.
That was a story about meritocracy. Or rather, one of its earliest forms.
The rules of the human tribe had, for millennia, always been Might Makes Right. The developed culture of today isn’t necessarily supportive of that idea, though believers of meritocracy (that is, mostly everyone) would only reverse the order and say that actually, Right Makes Might.
Right and Might themselves can refer to a whole plethora of things. Right is intellect. Right is perseverance. Discipline. Normalcy. Compliance. Might is money. Might is clout. Might is anything that grants you a bigger claim to the scarce resources than everyone else’s. These scarce resources can range from food and shelter, to romantic partners, to other people’s time and attention.
Well, you say, this is just the way the world is built. Beautiful, isn’t it? What else is new?
You see, the problem is that many people who are proponents of meritocracy see it as the best way to achieve justice, equality, happiness, and peace for the world around them. Well, hopefully they are ready for a rude awakening because this is all one big, obnoxious virtue signal. The idea that a hierarchy is favored, and needs to be enforced, has no connection with the ideals listed above. The idea that the standards for gauging a person’s worth, set by today’s capitalist society, are optimized towards the ideals listed above is bogus. The effort spent in gating and guarding scarce resources, instead of making them scarce no longer, are in no way conducive to the ideals listed above.
We’ve grown to accept that the pecking order, as it appears in multiple contexts – be it within the family, in your workplace, in your friend group, or in the wider socioeconomic strata – is self-evident. We are subconsciously aware that meritocracy is the oil that greases the relations we have with one another, and no matter how dissatisfied we become, we’re afraid to question them out of fear of questioning the very idea itself, the very idea that so many people hold up to be the harbinger of justice, equality, happiness, and peace.
There are even cases where someone brings meritocracy into areas where it doesn’t belong. This viral Tweet, which was closing in on around 30 million views at the time of writing, is one such example. Someone who wants benefits out of being a good person subscribes to a social hierarchy that has no place in the spirit of do-gooders. The act of being a good person literally has you giving up the resources that you otherwise would be getting – asking for resources to be allocated to you via priority lane is uncharacteristic of such “good person.”
Let’s talk about affirmative action. Forget about meritocracy for a second and take a look at the battle lines themselves. The resource being guarded here is access to a world class education – commonly seen as a one-way ticket to wealth and status – and the barrier to entry is what’s being debated. Should it be purely academic competence, or should race also be a factor? A good number of graduates of top-ranking schools land jobs in consulting and finance, so academic competence can be further distilled into the ability to maximize corporate profits. Let’s grant this to the detractors: with affirmative action in place, the graduates’ collective ability to maximize corporate profits wouldn’t be as high as it would’ve been otherwise. Are we, as a community of students, families, and workers, primarily concerned that shareholders won’t be seeing as much yield from their dividends? We are gate-keeping the opportunity to rise up within society using standards that are weird, for a lack of a better term, standards that many of us would ascribe to a world that lives up to our ideals of justice and equality for no good reason.
If you’re part of a economically disadvantaged minority with skin in the college admissions game, you’re likely to want enough people of your background to have access to the world-class education and get high-paying jobs such that your demographic group as a whole gains social and political clout. You would scoff at meritocracy and recognize that this is a struggle for Might, which your demographic group has been deprived of for so long throughout history.
If you are not a disadvantaged minority and also have skin in the game, your view of meritocracy is likely to be even more cynical. People from your socioeconomic class have, on average, grown up in an environment more conducive to academic competence than those of lower social status. If you gravitate towards purely meritocratic standards, you would be tipping the scale towards others who have also grown up in an environment that’s conducive to academic competence. Your preferred standards would favor those who are already winning the competition for resources, flipping the meritocratic principle of Right Makes Might on its head. Meritocracy, for you, would only be a rhetorical tool that reflects nothing of your true ideals. It’s just something cynically invoked as part of a competition over scarce resources that’s much grander in scale.
Picking sides on this issue isn’t about choosing whether or not meritocracy should run its course. It’s about whether you want meritocracy to be cast aside for being the phony ideal it has shown itself to be, or used as a manufactured cudgel for subjugating the powerless.
The standards set in place for evaluating someone’s place on the social hierarchy, both in school and at work, come down to labels such as intellect, perseverance, and discipline. These are the labels instilled in us by the economic system we live in, standards that govern the hierarchy that are contextual and aren’t part of any first principles. The higher your social standing is, the more influence you exert on which standards end up governing and which get passed over. Your influence even extends beyond the scope of someone’s role as a profit-maximizer. The traits that makes a person valuable as a worker sometimes get applied to non-work settings, where they are even used to appraise their social presence.
We are so sold on the idea of meritocracy that we naturally ascribe legitimacy to those who already have money and clout when, more often than not, resources being allocated the way they are does not optimize for justice, equality, happiness, and peace. We are so sold on the idea that Right Makes Might but don’t realize that switching the two gets you two sides of the same coin. Maybe you’re already attuned enough to the system to accept that having power in itself is what legitimizes you. In that case, meritocracy would be a useful little white lie, just a cute, covert virtue signal to help you rationalize your ideal – of how scarce resources should be allocated – to the less attuned. But if you are instead, by any chance, a decent person and still hold meritocracy up to be the guiding principle for fixing social ills, well, you’ve just seen the paradoxes that come with the idea laid bare in front of you.
If you’re somehow expecting a call to action, sorry to disappoint. Whatever way you end up analyzing social issues is something only you can cultivate in yourself. The only thing that matters is that you do so in a way that benefits yourself the most. If it benefits you to see others shown their place by virtue of not performing up to standard, then by all means, continue boosting the idea. Heck, you might even be better off convincing yourself that the concept holds water. If, on the other hand, you’re someone whose self-worth is outside the plane of existence, ask yourself if you want to continue subscribing to the standards that have been imposed on you. Individual worth is a two-way street. Those at the top are incentivized to keep you down and have you believe that the standards you don’t match up well against are self-evident and aren’t ever-shifting and arbitrary. Sure, this won’t alleviate your material conditions. It just might be a little healthier to see the system as opt-in rather than a strictly win-or-lose scenario.
It’s okay to be disillusioned with meritocracy if it had been something you’ve lived by all your life, especially if you have been a sincere believer of justice, equality, happiness, and peace. Positive, progressive social ideals are hard-fought and never to be taken lightly as part of someone’s core beliefs. Having to reconcile them against conflicting ideas is nothing new, and it’s no different with meritocracy. It starts on the individual level, with tiny steps. Recognize an in-group out-group dynamic in any social setting for what it is and use that knowledge at your discretion. Stop and pause for a bit before you automatically assume legitimacy on the basis of wealth and clout. Be a little more charitable with your time and attention, and take heed of the times you or someone else guard them as a scarce resource more than they should.
The natural impulses of Might Makes Right within each of us aren’t going to go away no matter what kind of rules govern a community, no matter which form of government flies their banner over the local city hall. It takes a conscious effort to rein in these impulses. We won’t get anywhere if we keep pretending we’ve moved beyond it altogether.
@ me here.