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In the United States, every politician from the “left” to the right assumes that the
role of society is to create an even playing field for everyone to compete in.
Usually, they only disagree on whether we’re there yet or not.
The idea is that regardless of where you start or how society perceives you, you should be
granted the ability to leverage your talent and your effort to rise to the level that
you are capable of.
Your accomplishments alone should be the only way by which you are granted status in society.
Influence, wealth, prestige, whatever your aspirations, in a meritocracy, the rule is
that the only way to get there is by doing something of merit.
I don’t like that notion, at least not all of it, and I’m gonna spend about fifteen
minutes on it so strap in, and enjoy the ride.
In this episode, we’re going to be looking at the way that meritocracy, once a slur thrown
around by socialists, became the dominant ideology of the Imperial Core and the backbone
of neoliberal capitalism.
We’re going to look at the reality of upward mobility in the US and how meritocracy has
been used to replace democracy with rule by an elite minority.
This video is going to be a sort of “part two” to our previous video on meritocracy.
It’s by no means necessary to have seen it to watch this one, but if you’d like
to start there, the link is in the description.
So let’s start by getting a few things out of the way.
As much as some politicians like to say it, we very clearly don’t live in a meritocracy.
Upward mobility, the idea that you can easily change your life from the circumstances you
are born into with “hard work” or “intelligence” alone, does not exist.
More than just about anything else, where you start has a massive impact on where you
end up.
For the majority of the millennial and gen-z generation, the rule actually seems to be
downward mobility.
Specifically, the likelihood that a millennial or gen-z American will attain a higher standard
of living than their parents is in the low 40s, meaning well over 50% of people will
experience a downward trajectory over the course of their lives.
That’s a group-based analysis and at the individual level, things aren’t much better.
For someone born in the lower quintile of the income distribution, the odds they’ll
make it into the top quintile is only 10%, half as much as what that number should be
in a meritocracy.
For most people, there’s a far greater chance that you’ll either remain in the quintile
you were born into or the one immediately below or above you, even more so if you aren’t
straight, white, or a man.
In over 50% of cases, your parents’ experienced inequality, their social standing, is directly
passed down to you.
And for a country that has branded upward mobility with its name, the “American Dream,”
the US is pretty terrible at actually guaranteeing it.
Among wealthy nations, it’s only 16th in upward mobility and there’s a good chance
that number is only going to go down.
Unsurprisingly, this is the outcome of the United State’s neoliberal political program.
Fans will know I’ve already spent a lot of time talking about liberalism on this channel,
and with friends, my therapist, and okay fine they’re not friends they’re slightly different
kinds of leftist and I hate them…
Anyway, if you haven’t heard about it before, let's quickly go over liberalism.
“Liberalism” is a word you’ve probably heard used to describe Democrats but more
accurately the word applies equally to the two major US parties.
In a liberal economy, the role of the state is to not exist, or exist just a tiny bit,
and instead give the market the final say on who makes it out alive.
It’s survival of the fittest for companies, ideas, and people, and therefore whatever
or whoever is left when the dust settles has earned their place no matter how they got
there.
To make sure none of the perfection of market outcomes is perverted, you get pitifully weak
safety nets in very liberal states and, because all-out competition is seen as the most legitimate
way to decide what is good and bad, everything enters this competition and becomes commodified,
from healthcare to schooling to basic necessities.
Since markets are deemed to be the best at deciding what is good and bad, markets come
to decide just about everything.
Even though you couldn’t ask for a more meritocratic system, it turns out this approach
leads to a couple of things that don’t really jibe with meritocracy.
The obvious one is that being poor starts costing a lot more.
In liberal markets “The poor are not only disadvantaged because they have less money
but also because money is increasingly needed to buy goods, services, and even opportunities
for their children.
In a deeply commodified regime, parents are left to purchase high-quality childcare, high-quality
primary and secondary schooling (if only by moving into expensive neighborhoods), and
high-quality college training, all of which means that opportunity itself has been commodified.”
In other words, the logic of markets and the fact that they favor the guy with money in
his pocket means that there’s no such thing as equal opportunity under supposedly meritocratic
liberal regimes.
That was a quote from the Poverty and Inequality Report and it’s only the first part of what’s
going on here.
Structural issues like housing segregation, which reached its apex during the “redlining”
era, play into very persistent feedback loops meant to trap people in poverty.
Low quality housing leads to low property taxes which lead to underfunded schools and
worse education than in the unaffordable private sector or in wealthier neighborhoods.
Worse education holds people back, lowering incomes down the line and preventing them
from getting better housing in neighborhoods with better schools and you can tell where
this is going.
With a zip code alone, you can pretty reliably tell where someone ends up down the line and
that’s a pretty clear problem for a country that wants to be a meritocracy.
But this is also a problem for meritocracy itself.
So long as meritocracy’s reward is differential privilege that you can pass down, meritocracy
dies in just a single generation.
The problem with meritocracy is that if you play the game you ruin it for everyone else
that comes after you.
Imagine you use your big boy brain to make drinking water illegal unless it’s from
your premium service, your kids will be far better off than the average person without
ever having had that brilliant idea.
The challenge for meritocracy is that it is incompatible with the economic system that
champions it.
But how did we even get to that point?
The truth is that meritocracy, upward mobility, whatever you want to call it, is a relatively
new cultural obsession.
There is evidence that the idea of an “aristocracy of talent” dates back to the French and
American revolutions but the actual word “meritocracy,” only appeared for the first time in the left-wing
journal “Socialist Commentary” in an article by Alan Fox back in 1956.
Needless to say, Fox doesn’t love the term he seems to have come up with, putting it
in sarcastic quotes and delivering classic knee slappers like:
“This way lies the ‘meritocracy’; the society in which the gifted, the smart, the
energetic, the ambitious and the ruthless are carefully sifted out and helped towards
their destined positions of dominance, where they proceed not only to enjoy the fulfilment
of exercising their natural endowments but also to receive a fat bonus thrown in for
good measure.”
For Fox and eventually Michael Young, a writer who would pick up and popularize the term
two years later with his dystopian novel “The Rise of the Meritocracy,” meritocracy has
only ever been one thing: a way for elite classes to reproduce themselves, to set the
rules of the game in a favorable way to their own privileges, and to then coat them in enough
positive morality to make it seem like an inherently good way to structure our society.
But this doesn’t happen naturally.
It turns out it’s really hard to convince people that what they want is a system where
if they’re not “smart” enough by the system’s standards that they’re not deserving
of the safety and luxury of the few at the top.
So, the same way that a Pepsi ad sells you a fizzy brown drink with footage of a made
up protest, liberation movements of the 60s were entirely co-opted by the emergent neoliberal
capitalist regime.
Real anger and demands for change were brought into the fold of the economy that produced
them in a series of subtle reforms by social democratic and “Third Way” politicians
in the UK and the US, who came to embrace terms like meritocracy while completely ignoring
their origins as dystopian vocabulary.
It’s like if 25 years from now, the Democratic candidate was the pro-Hunger Games guy because,
when you think about it, isn’t a lottery-based battle royale actually a very meritocratic
way to decide who gets food?
The result of these political movements is that instead of addressing the structural
inequalities faced and resisted by women, racial minorities, members of the LBGT community,
and the poor, the new narrative became that it is success within the rat race, not its
abolition, that is revolutionary.
Of course that never materialized, and marginalized people are mostly still kept down across the
board, but the belief that there is a broad equality of opportunity has persisted.
The few who do “make it” from the last remaining unequal starting lines are put in
the spotlight and turned into symbols of social progress to shame the many more who never
do.
So concretely what do you get from meritocracy?
Evidently not upward mobility, nothing resembling social equality in the least, but most of
all, you get entitlement for those who do succeed.
And entitlement at the top breeds many things, not least of all a conservative view that
the status quo is justified.
In that sense, meritocracy, and the very real belief in it, acts as a great way to pacify
any movement for social change, to reject any form of redistribution of wealth, to deny
the fact that structural factors, or even simple luck, can result in dramatic differences
in outcome.
Those who are given outsized power are the very same who have benefitted from things
being exactly as they are, creating a deeply conservative logic within a movement meant
to be the progressive alternative to hereditary privilege.
The common good goes out the window.
Taken to its extreme, a meritocratic regime raises questions among those at the top like
“why bother with democratic dialogue if order has already been achieved in such a
just and fair way?”
Figures on the right jump on these narratives to justify their own power and the repression
of democracy.
People like Musk, Bezos, and billionaire buddies are glorified by hordes of people who come
to distrust the “average person,” who hasn’t achieved nearly as much as their
heroes.
Grifters like Gary Vee and his cohort of “inspirational entrepreneurs” sell these narratives and
contrast them with those coming from the left, making it seem like any structural analysis
of injustice is jealous SJWs whining that they aren’t as brilliant and hardworking
as they are, not as willing to spend a supposed 18-hour day rising and grinding like a true
sigma.
In short these libs just don’t know how to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
They’re just playing the victim card.
And this is all because while meritocracy gives a theoretical right to everyone to everyone
to achieve their potential, it only gives access to that right to a minority, usually
already selected from the elite.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with the idea that society should support and actively
incentivise the development of people’s skills and interests.
Both for the benefit of individual people and society at large, the little differences
that make us unique, bring us joy, and allow us to improve ourselves, our communities,
and the world should be things we cultivate.
What is wrong is the “-ocracy” part of meritocracy, the idea that these differences
should justify an upper class to form around these attributes.
The idea that an enlightened elite should decide for the majority with no accountability
is profoundly undemocratic, and we’ve seen how even small concessions to meritocracy
lead to anything but a fair society.
It’s time to give up on the idea that it’s all about equality of opportunity.
The more we can, instead, democratize our economy and give everyone an equal say in
the decisions that affect us all, the more easily we can escape the unjust social structure
we have been sold as the ticket to our salvation.
If you enjoyed this week’s topic, I highly recommend you check out “Happiness At Work”
on CuriosityStream.
It’s an hour long documentary about how our relationship with work profoundly affects
our mental state.
And that is very relevant when talking about meritocracy.
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