On Pseudo-Meritocracies

TL;DR —I’m aiming to provoke meaningful, head-shaking neuronal activity by claiming that pseudo-meritocracies are worse than no meritocracy at all: After all, in an explicit aristocracy, the underprivileged are at least spared the futile struggle and humiliation that comes with making it to a top that is not reachable.

Much of the history of the West —from the Founding Fathers and the French Revolution up until today’s organization of labour in Silicon Valley — evolves implicitly around the establishment of what we now call a meritocracy.

The rough concept, today, is this: a meritocracy is a society in which individuals are assigned power, wealth and status based on merit alone: talent, aptitude, intelligence and hard work are the foundations and drivers of such success — this, of course, is opposed to a society in which all relevant status is purely determined through inheritance alone.

The concept of a meritocracy is popular across a diverse political spectrum, as it in theory provides equal initial opportunities to everyone while still ensuring an outcome that’s unequal enough to keep things interesting; after all, a merit-based society and economy will still and always have winners and losers and power law distributions — leaving the outcomes untouched means that the concept flies with both conservative and libertarian thinkers and doers alike.

Any real meritocracy is probably superior to the aristocracies and plutocracies of the past, in which an individuals’ power, status and wealth was effectively and unfairly determined through inheritance alone. This is relevant both in ethical, intrinsic terms — think: fairness — but also in extrinsic terms, e.g. meritocracies provide an accelerated technological progress through a larger and more effectively deployed talent pool.
However — and here is my argument: a meritocracy can only be superior to those other, caste-like systems if it implements the concept to some actual significant extent. If it falls short of that and mostly merely calls itself “meritocratic”, it is a pseudo-meritocracy; and I’m arguing that this is worse than an explicit aristocracy.

Three premises:

1. Most societies in the West today — especially the US, the UK, and most of the Eurozone — de facto aren’t meritocracies. We have at best managed to establish micro-meritocratic processes within classes, but not across them. The latter is evidenced by the low social mobility performance indicators in most of the West.
   Yet, we seem convinced that we have achieved a great deal in implementing meritocracies that are close to ideal, and the narrative our societies keep telling themselves is one in which talent, put to hard work, will be rewarded. The numbers, whichever way you slice them, show this is simply not true — if you are born into a lower class, you and your kids will most likely stay in it, regardless of anecdotal heros and statistical outliers. What this means is that we are, in fact, pseudo-meritocracies.
2. The second premise is that the overarching goal of societies is to ensure and promote the dignity and happiness of all of its members, constrained and enhanced solely by moral and ethical considerations.
3. The third premise is that presenting individuals with clearly desirable options (i. e. economic success) that are claimed to be achievable when they are really not (as evidenced by poor social mobility) is detrimental to happiness, and in fact promotes unhappiness and misery. It is also, in pure kindergarten-ethics terms, a lie.
   This, of course, primarily affects the lower classes that are presented with essentially non-existing or unobtainable opportunities.

What follows then is this:

A pseudo-meritocratic society — modulo the estalishment of human rights, which isn’t really up for debate here — is de facto a self-deceiving aristocratic society in disguise, inheriting many of the bad bits from aristocratic societies, especially with regards to the unfair distribution of economic opportunity.

Worse, it promotes unhappiness and misery, as it adds humiliating insult to the injury of unfairness when it’s pretending that the successfulness of of the successful is simply earned on the basis of merit, and that being and remaining poor is not a matter of inherited class, but explainable by a lack of talent and willpower.

It is this aspect that, freakishly, makes pseudo-meritocracies worse than a explicitly aristocratic society, in which everyone ‘knows their place’, but is being spared the mockery of having the misery of one’s situation being explained away by one’s lack of ‘hustling’ and agency.

What to make of this? We could either opt to drop the meritocratic label from our cultural narratives, admit failure and rewind a few hundred years of western thought. The alternative is to take seriously what we as societies have achieved and where we still fall tremendously short of what’s left to do.