Meritocracy – the poisoned chalice

Many claim our modern Western societies are meritocracies, but are they, and would a true meritocracy be any better?

Merit can be the basis of two outcomes. One is for choices based on competency, which is about being selected for roles based upon how well we are likely to do them. This is appropriate for those that have to be done to a particular standard. Even to learn tasks, there is a need for enough competency to undertake the learning. As a basis for suitability for roles in our societies, using merit in this way would probably lead to the best outcomes. But then, not everything is about being the most competent, but gaining competencies through experience, which would make us better for later roles.

The other outcome is as the basis of reward, and this is really what meritocracy has worked out to be in practice in our societies. Those who claim competency feel entitled to the biggest rewards. But to confer any real advantage, a reward has to endure in some way, otherwise it is just like receiving applause for doing something well, and then its almost immediately back to what was happening beforehand. No, for meritocracy to work, the reward has to confer some ongoing advantage that benefits those who earn the reward long after they have stopped earning any more rewards.

Getting an enduring reward gives the receiver some advantage. If that advantage confers upon them the ability to gain further rewards than they would have if they did not get the original reward, then the rewards aggregate, leading to even further advantage. We see this process at work all the time because those who benefit from it leverage the aggregating reward to embed themselves as the elite in all areas of our societies.

However, it is not just rampaging aggregating reward that is creating the gross inequalities in our societies. Those who have become the elite tend to not want to have challengers to their status, so rather than allow those challengers to have their best shot, the elite will actively undermine those challengers, typically by throwing up obstacles to their ability to earn rewards, or distract them from pursuing such goals altogether, but generally it is both in tandem.

Promoting elitism automatically leads to the down-valuing of those who do not have the same levels of competency, and so further reinforces inequality. This has become so distorted that those who have profited from the inequality are using it as further justification of why they, and their families, should get even more. This has tipped our societies from any semblance of meritocracy to full-on plutocracies.

History and the present shows us the powerful have continuously abused the benefit of their rewards to improve their wealth and status and repress any individuals or groups that sought to challenge them, leading to the gross inequality we have today. Abuse is then easy to justify. This is all because we have all believed that being good at something must lead to an enduring reward, forgetting that the mechanics of that belief can only lead to the problems we have in the world today when taken to its logical full-scale conclusion. That is what has lead to wars and the climate catastrophe.

But merit is not the same us usefulness. Covid showed us that while there were many who were competent and well-paid for it, the continuity of our societies relied upon those who were in low-skilled jobs just turning up for work. Then and now, those are the ones that our societies really rely upon, so why should they not receive fair value as well? It begs the question of why are people being paid so much for mostly made-up jobs that do not really help the smooth-running of our societies?

If this inequality is due to wanting reward, why do we reward competency at all, other than allowing those with it to continue? We have all grown up with this idea of reward-based merit, but is it really necessary? It does sort-of sound like a plausible sentiment, but it assumes that the only basis for our effort is to get monetary reward, with a hint of status-improvement thrown in. However, we humans do put a lot of effort into hobbies and other activities for which our reward is that of doing and accomplishing them, without any regard to monetary return or increase in social status.

So what if we dispensed with rewards for competency, split our resources more equitably, and rebuilt our societies to allow us all to spend most of our time indulging our interests as we see fit? After all, we were promised that a century ago as a supposed result of being modern industrialised societies. Instead we got exploited and more obstacles were put in our way to prevent us getting most of the advantages we were supposedly working towards. With the earth being unable to handle the resource usage of just a minority of the population, it is most imperative that we stop the inequality.

It comes down to determining what is the minimum effort we need to maintain the population of the earth in the most equitable way, and what is the maximum resource usage that the earth can handle sustainably. We can then choose where we want to live between these bounds. The key is to never allow merit to determine our reward or status. That way we can contribute to the running of our societies in the best way each of us can, without it being used to penalise us, or lock us out of the benefits of them.

We have assumed merit is a valid way to apportion reward because we have been immersed in a system that relies upon it, that has been perpetuated by those who really benefit from it, and who keep promoting it as the best for us. But our habits of thought do not necessarily guarantee the best outcomes, and these thoughts are destroying us and the planet. We have the capability to envision other ways of running our societies, and the present situation shows us that we need to find another way soon, and make it a reality.