TL;DR at the bottom if you don't feel like reading
Forewarning, this is a pretty long post I originally wrote somewhere else, but it seemed like something that belonged here too so here it is:
“The Myth of Meritocracy” is kind of like the modern-day equivalent of “Divine Right”, used back during the days of monarchies and empires, and is another way extreme power and wealth inequalities between the rich/elite/aristocracy and the poor/middle/working class have been justified throughout history.
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1521: “They deserve the power and wealth because God chose them to rule, if I follow according to their rule God will bless me too.”
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2021: “They deserve the power and wealth because they just worked harder and smarter than all the rest of us, if I work smart enough and hard enough I can be rich too.”
It's essentially the same idea, just rebranded to fit a modern-day capitalist organization of the economy.
Centuries ago, the incredibly rich and powerful aristocracies of the day came to be so because of:
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Nepotism and/or corruption that kept wealth circulating within the upper echelons of government, and out of the hands of the impoverished majority, whose labor they used to reap massive profit, while standing on their backs.
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Exploitation of resources from foreign lands, mainly in the form of colonial imperialism and expansion. Wars, conquering of territories, annexations, slavery, the whole nine yards. (Think English & Spanish empires.)
How did they justify this? Divine Right, of course.
“God willed us to be in this position of prominence, wealth, power, etc, and He willed you to be our humble subjects, which is why we are here, and you are not.”
Not much has changed since, when you think about it. How did the billionaires and multi-billion/trillion-dollar corporations of today get to be so big?
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By lobbying government to pass legislation allowing them to get away with paying little to nothing in taxes, despite being the largest wealth accumulators in the world. Again, keeping wealth at the top, and away from the majority of people, despite those people actually being the ones to have produced that wealth with their labor. Of course with some of the same old flavors of nepotism, corruption, etc,
sprinkledbaked in. -
By exploiting the resources of the global south to extract cheap, unregulated, overseas labor and mass produce goods to turn an incredible profit off of what is effectively slavery, be it in the form of wage slavery or just literal slavery. And again, we see imperial military power and forms of neo-colonialism used to secure resources and further the interests of wealth and capital, always at great cost to the poor. Not to forget the extraction of labor from the economically disadvantaged domestically as well, of course.
And the pandemic only made things worse. Here are some insane numbers:
Just 1%.
All this at the same time that hundreds of thousands were dying, and millions were sick, unemployed, facing eviction, and without adequate health insurance (or any health insurance at all, for that matter) as a result of it being tied to their work, in the midst of a global health crisis. All this in the wealthiest nation on Earth. All this in the United States, ALONE. Let's not even get started on the state of the rest of the world.
And how do we justify this? Meritocracy, of course.
“The people at the top simply earned their way to the top, purely through merit, by working harder and smarter than everyone else and providing value to the rest of society, which is why they should remain at the top and workers should continue to work for them. (Even at great risk to their own health and safety, as a literal plague is ravaging the globe.)”
Sound familiar? The blueprint is the same. The only difference between then and now is that now we have an unprecedented amount of access to information that allows us quantify the degree of gross wealth inequality in ways we couldn't before.
But with government seeming to always favor the interests of capital and profit over the legitimate interests of the people they are supposed to represent, change in the positive direction is slow and the wealth gap between the rich and poor continues to widen, because for decades we have been deceived into believing this is just the way it's meant to be.
To be clear, there is no boot-strapping your way out of a broken system. No amount of success stories or propaganda will change the material reality for most people. In a world where your location of birth is the most statistically significant factor in predicting virtually other major aspect of your life, from quality of school, to average family, income, to your health and ultimately your life expectancy, there is no such thing as a meritocracy.
Societies have been doing this for as long as history can remember. We recognize now that Divine Right is a foolish ideology that only served to protect the interests of the rich, and justify the subjugation of the poor. However, we have collectively failed to recognize the same myth persisting in our current society in the form of a supposed meritocracy, putting the burden of economic inequality on the impoverished, instead of the wealthy, who are actually responsible.
To put it simply, we've arrived at the self-evident conclusion of political democracy, but somehow failed to make the same logical leap to economic democracy. The two are inextricably linked, and we cannot have a properly functioning society without both.
Economics is the one area of our lives that has more of a direct material effect than politics does, and yet it is not beholden to the same democratic processes that politics is, despite the ways it effects us on a massive scale. This makes no sense. None of the economic inequality issues that exist today will be resolved until we have accountability in the form of economic democracy.
It is well past time we make that leap, to a more equitable world, for everyone's sake, and stop putting up with bullshit narratives meant to keep things the same, and prevent us from changing things for the better.
Thanks for reading.
TL;DR: Meritocracy is as much a lie as Divine Right. History has shown that we keep coming up with ways to justify gross inequality and subjugate the poor. The current shitshow of affairs is bearing itself out in the numbers. We need economy democracy to better ensure material equality (or hell, just material improvement) for the vast majority of poor and working class people.