Meritocracy and the coming Rule of the Vicious

 

One of the problems with Meritocracy, which depresses nearly everyone and makes them resentful, and which in the USA is about to be replaced to some degree by something much worse, for how long who knows, comes from its limited imagination on how to deal with opportunity. A person wins a key award and then starts being given nearly all the available awards; wins a key opportunity and starts being given nearly all the opportunities; has been given enough money so that they can’t help but make more unless they’re utterly foolish.

These people often are (but not always are) worthy people, but they’re not worthy of receiving everything, while meanwhile other worthy people often barely get enough to keep going and do things that go unrecognized and unrewarded. Of course the winners of worthiness are people who win because they fit an already determined profile of worthiness, not because they are inherently better at what they are doing, although some of them are indeed impressive at what they do. And we should never ignore that “profiling” also has its opposite, dangerous side that highlights, even more unfairly, the concept of unworthiness and who gets tagged with it.

Resentment of Meritocracy in the USA, often but not always deserved, because Meritocracy has become so extreme in this country, is one of the causes of what we’re about to see: the rule of the vicious, the corrupt, the abuser, the colonizer, the racist and sexist, the paid or random assassin. And of course The Rule of the Vicious is not entirely the opposite of The Rule of Meritocracy. Meritocracy is at best a restraint placed on the Rule of the Vicious, not its opposite but something that gives it rules and boundaries.

Those who resent Meritocracy because they feel (often rightly) that it has left them out, and those who hate it because it restrains their viciousness, have combined, by no means always intentionally (in fact the latter have greatly manipulated the former), to give us the Rule of the Vicious that this country is about to see. Of course, only the second of these two groups will benefit from what is on the way, which all of us who believe in democracy and the possibility of equal opportunity should work together to resist.