Adam Weishaupt once said, ‘Meritocracy is not a pass/fail system, but rather a system that allows each person to find their own highest attainment.’ Every word in that sentence was wrong. Meritocracy is precisely a pass/fail system. Meritocracy is exactly what prevents a person from finding their own highest attainment. Meritocracy provides us with the difference between what we get and what we deserve. A supposedly unbiased characteristic, determined solely by the ‘innate’ qualities of a person, their education and experience, merit has been the long-standing basis for capitalism. However omnipotent this golden ideal sounds, the idea of merit is explicitly the cause for inequality across the world. It only makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer.
What is merit?
Merit is a quality of every person based not on their wealth, social standing, race, gender, caste, creed, sexuality, political position, nationality, et cetera, rather on their innate talents, acquired skills, earned achievements and persevering efforts. Merit is a key component of providing the equality of opportunity to people, as contrasted to equality of outcome. Merit is often used in a hypothetical purely capitalist system to divide economic goods and political power. The basis of this division is naturally the ‘you get what you deserve’ rhetoric of capitalist philosophers, most notably Milton Friedman.
Merit is an abstract term, but as Michael Young put it, it’s just IQ + Effort. But what is intelligence? All philosophy and epistemology hitherto have been unable to define intelligence in all its broadness. Is emotion a sign of intelligence? Or is it the ability to learn? Is it the ability to process information? Or is it a combination of two or more factors? Regardless, intelligence can seldom be classified, and is impossible to measure. To differentiate between men on the basis of standardised testing and psychological evaluation is folly. And yet, that is the system we live in today. A meritocracy. To understand the importance of merit, let us look at the differences between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity.
Equality of Opportunity vs Equality of Outcome.
Imagine that humanity is running an infinite relay race track. Equality of opportunity tells us that we should ensure that everyone starts at the same line, ending at different lines, while equality of outcome wants to make sure we all end together, because we cannot start at the same one. Naturally, you may feel the equality of opportunity is more just, since it doesn’t undermine our efforts, as we end up where we deserve to be. Then again, does everyone start on the same line? No. If a person’s parents were poor, there’s a greater likelihood that their child would be poor as well. Imagine this time that every time a person dies, his successor takes up the relay baton and runs on, but he’s already behind those people whose predecessors ran further in their lives. Over time, these gaps increase and increase till we reach the point where humanity is right now: just nine of the world’s richest people have more than the poorest four billion. Funnily enough, the only way to make sure even starts at the same line is to make sure that their predecessors end at the same one (equality of outcome).
There are two perspectives to this issue. The capitalist would inform you that most of the world’s multimillionaires are self-made, solely by their ‘merit’. Only about a fifth of them inherited their wealth. Ergo, they got more money than the rest of humanity combined because ‘they deserved it.’ The communist would inform you that most of the world’s poor had poor predecessors, they inherited their poverty. Only a remote percentage actually fell beneath the poverty line. Ergo, they got less money than even the worth of solely their body’s organs because of their familial circumstances. According to capitalism, you get rich because you deserve to, and therefore, the poor are poor because they deserve to be. This logic contradicts the entirety of the idea of merit. If you are poor because your parents were poor, this means that your economic status and political power is based on your social standing: and that’s not merit.
Why can’t the poor have merit?
Theoretically speaking, they can. The obvious question then is: why don’t they? According to capitalist philosophers high up in ivory towers, it’s because they don’t want to. These thinkers believe that poverty isn’t a condition, but an attitude. That if one day a poor man decides to become rich he can (‘poverty thinking’). Unfortunately, that’s just not true. The average impoverished child in the slum and the average middle class child in a villa end up with an unbridgeable chasm between their ‘merit’. Even if they have the same talents and intelligence (which in itself is very abstractly defined), the average middle class child will always get access to more and better facilities and amenities – be it education or environment. The average poor child would have to battle finances and authority just to get a plain education, succumbing to the inferior quality they receive. It is as the maxim goes, ‘The wealthier you are, the wealthier you get.’
So what are the problems with a ‘Meritocracy’?
Wealth inequality. As expressed before, a merit-based system is prone to creating an accumulation of income inequalities over generations to disastrous effects. In fact, sociologist Jo Littler even called it a cover for plutocracy. Meritocracy is a form of self-justification by the elites for the power they possess. It’s a way to make them feel better about their hoarding society’s wealth and power.
Elitism. A meritocratic system is always biased to those in power. Note how every theorist, every believer in the system is rich. Meritocracy is a system made by the rich to justify their wealth, and helps keep the wealth amongst them. The SAT, often touted as a tool free of any distinction based on gender, race, nationality et cetera, has been found to be implicitly biased towards middle-class/rich whites. In fact, most rich people will pass on the privilege of wealth to their children, giving them both what is considered legitimate and illegitimate merit (by bribery, cheating, fraud, as the scandals which keep shaking the foundations of educational institutions like Harvard).
Social stratification. Meritocracy is often used as a cover for all sorts of misogyny, prejudice and stereotyping. Often, the question of merit is used to vindicate the absence of diversity. Take the example of India, where merit is used as the go-to argument against those who cite the lack of representation of women in their parliament. Merit is also used to justify why most companies’ board of directors usually consist of rich, white males. Women, because of their gender, are not given access to equal opportunities, which leads to accumulating less merit, and therefore disqualified. This is indirectly discrimination.
What else can we use instead of merit?
Indeed, there seems to be little choice to substitute merit. Why would we choose the antithesis of a metric which stands for equality and fairness? Except that’s the wrong question. We need to find an alternative inclusive of the circumstances of a person. On the other hand, such an alternative would entirely rework the system and potentially lead to a greater demotivation of educational pursuits. Often touted examples include the Functiocracy, which is based on social utilitarian values.
Yet amongst all these alternatives, it is true that we cannot entirely give up merit. We just need to change what it means. Merit is a perfectly rational system to distinguish between people (when coupled to include emotional intelligence, soft skills, and other such humane values), but only when everyone has equal access to all of society’s resources. Such a world is only possible with a high Universal Basic Income. This, of course, is a controversial solution to multiple socioeconomic problems and may be derided for reducing the compulsion for work, free money, et cetera, however, as the following article will explain, UBI could comprehensively solve the problem of merit, perfecting the system.
Conclusion.
Meritocracy is wrong. A system ruled by the ‘cognitive elite’ is not one palatable. However, when it takes into consideration the various other human attributes – emotions, soft skills, art – it may be able to perform its primary objective pragmatically. To ensure that, however, we need to be able to define intelligence, a topic which will be addressed in a future article. Similarly, without analysing the potential of UBI, we may never be able to ensure that humanity starts the race at the same line. Ironic as it is, they must end together to start together. But when it comes to our current illusion, there’s no merit in meritocracy
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