The Meritocracy Myth

The meritocracy, if it exists, needs to end. Since it doesn't exist, it's the meritocracy myth that needs to end. If we place the individual at the center of all our ideologies, if, for example, "freedom" is to be explained and enjoyed from the perspective of an individual, we need anything but a meritocracy.

_{Image by geralt - source: Pixabay}

The meritocracy is a myth. Just by reading the definition one can discern the nonsense within: "a political system in which economic goods and/or political power are vested in individual people on the basis of talent, effort, and achievement, rather than wealth or social class." It's the old "work hard and you'll do just fine" trope, often used by the political right to justify and even romanticize the capitalist ideology of free individuals doing their business in free markets through voluntary agreements. What this idea amounts to is just another kind of class structure; we now rank individuals according to the "merit" we assign to their function or role in society. It's not how much you own, it's how much good you add to society as a whole that determines if you're a grade "A", "B" or whatever person.

According to how you look at this, this meritocracy doesn't sound so bad; people who make the lifes of many people in society better through their talents and effort should be rewarded for this. The problem is that it's being reversed. He always have been, and always will be ranked according to how much we own in capitalism, there's no way around this 10,000 year old fact. So what happens is that people turn meritocracy on its head and reason that rich people must have done much good, or else they wouldn't be so rich; we live under meritocratic principles, don't we? So if Steve Jobs earns billions of dollars, the reason MUST be that he made so much lifes better. And this is indeed what many believe, sadly. Like most rich people, Jobs was just a ruthless opportunist who was at the right place, met the right people at the right time to steal their bright ideas and use them in gadgets he developed around government funded (payed by your tax-dollars) technologies and produced under slave-wager circumstances in totalitarian countries.

I just wanted to add that aspect of the meritocratic ideology, as it is not touched upon in the video I linked below. Dr. Richard D. Wolff, one of my favorite socialists, explains what's wrong with the meritocracy and how it compels us to rank human beings as if they were potatoes. He also cleverly points out how our meritocratic model hinders individual freedom and the development of individual talents, and how that in turn deprives society as a whole of those talents.

_{Wolff on Meritocracy}

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