For and Against Meritocracy

When I was younger I used to think the meritocracy of conservative commentators like David Brooks was a reasonable idea. Why not encourage our best and brightest to lead society? I've always been a Leftie and thus opposed to most of the conservative reactionaries like Brooks (who authored "Bobo's in Paradise" one of the most uncritical self-congratulatory wanks on the merits of the well-to-do & well-educated one could ever read). So I have lived with some degree of mild cognitive conflict, thinking conservatives sometimes make good points, but unable to fathom why their politics are so greed-driven and pro-capitalist and anti-labour. You'd think anyone with a brain would agree it is a good thing for everyone to support and back workers, they are the bedrock upon which all of society depends, without workers society cannot function, oppressing workers and labour unions is like society cutting off it's own hands.

Then I started to branch out from my comfort zone of mathematical physics and think about why society is decaying even as national GDP's rise and the rich get more and more affluent. In the 1990's I read about neoliberalism and neoclassical economics, and thus understood the insane ideological basis for this neo-feudalism that we've seen emerging. And I realised well-educated people can be hopelessly naive and dangerous. Learning from textbook economics will turn you into a misanthropist reactionary. Luckily my background came from reading chaos theory and economists like Brian Arthur, who understood complex systems theory, and who did not buy in to the myths of market efficiency, equilibrium price setting and Say's Law. The economy is a chaotic complex dynamic system, and must be treated as such. So I never trusted textbook economics, which I found to be devoid of realistic analysis and drowned by really dopey physics envy and simplistic modelling, to the point of being out right hazardous for one's intellectual health.

In the early 2000's I wanted to be a better teacher, and I read widely covering modern methods, constructivism, discovery, ZPD, learning styles, Ken Robinson, Paulo Freire, Alfie Kohn, the free school movement, and more, and I learned most upper university level well-educated people have no education at all that qualifies them to run the world.

Then after the 2007/8 global financial crisis I started reading about critiques of capitalism, Marx, Minsky, Hudson, Keen, Chomsky, Hedges, et al., and I learned about the psychology of intellectual lock-in, greed, academic corruption, massive scale (world wide) group think, and other pathologies of neoliberalism. Lately I started reading about how the average conservative mind thinks, in Corey Robins' "The Reactionary Mind". I read about the greed and narcissism rife in Silicon Valley (Corey Pine's "Live, Work, Work, Die") and about the history of neoliberalism (Phillip Mirowski, "Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste") and the corruption and insanity in the EU Troika ("Adults in the Room" by Varoufakis) and I read further about the history of Marxist thought, socialism, anarchism, the civil rights movement, and revolution from the "Black Jacobins" (C.L.R. James) to Chris Hedges calls for a modern day revolution. And I've seen the mild revolution of the Bernie Sanders campaign and the young turks of democratic socialism led by AOC, Ilan Omar and Rashida Tlaib get consistently trashed and smeared by mainstream media and neoliberal elites. And have lamented the complete lack of any such glimmer of revolution in my own country of Aotearoa New Zealand, and wept inwardly. Then I understood the scale of the struggle for emancipation of the oppressed.

Now I have come nearly full circle, but not quite, I have spiralled upwards. I think meritocracy is a valid notion, but the problem is who decides what counts as meritorious? It clearly cannot be formal education, because we've seen and lived through, and continue to suffer, under the insane austerity and horrifically anti-human results of nerds who think they know what is good for us all, the neoliberal fanatics.

That's why the image I've chosen for this easy is not a paean to education and science, but rather an icon of power to the people.

What I want to see is a social democracy movement which allows people to freely elect local representatives whom we can choose based on their honesty, their integrity, their proven hard work, their proven loyalty to community, their social conscience, their willingness to stand for truth and reject textbook rote learning which so clearly benefits the rich at the expense of the poor. I believe in that sort of meritocracy. It cannot be measured. We must help each other learn about the character, moral fibre, and trustworthiness of those we seek to place in temporary positions of power. And we must have robust and fair systems for removing power from people who demonstrate they are corrupt and do not have the interests of the common people at the centre of their hearts.