The Myth of Meritocracy as an Obstacle to Freedom

My preference for freedom is of relatively recent origin, and most of my life I was almost authoritarian in my ideology. I am generally happier now, although my ideal society is hardly realized, and I often wonder why so many people fail to embrace freedom and instead promote an increasingly powerful state. In looking back on my own conversion experience, I consider the biggest obstacle to happiness and right thinking in my life to be the “Cult of Respectability”. The craving for respectability let me align myself ideologically with the rich and powerful and to despise the poor and downtrodden. It enabled me to see the state as the driver of the civilizing process and to see service to the state as a higher calling. In short, I was a tool and a dupe (some would say a jackass in the bargain). I am grateful that I was never important enough to do much harm, although I have some things to atone for.

I am not sure what opened my eyes. The process was one of gradual disillusionment rather than sudden insight. A big part was experiencing the state in action and knowing some wealthier and more powerful people, although most of my acquaintances were hardly more than the petit bourgeois. In working in grossly ineffectual agencies, I learned that the state was just people acting in their own selfish interests while exercising power over others. And the wealthy and powerful weren’t morally superior to the poor and weak; they were mostly just luckier, and they operated within a system that happened to favor them. There was an unavoidable disconnect between my ideology and what I saw in practice.

It is embarrassing to me now that I, son of working class parents and having a negative net worth for most of my life, could identify with the rich and powerful and think for a moment that my interests were in line with theirs. I blame the lure of respectability and the myth of the meritocracy (you don’t expect me to implicate my lack of character, do you?). Meritocracy is a misnomer. Meritocracy does not reward the deserving; rather, it is nothing more than a system for selecting compliant servants of the ruling classes. Merit, in the sense of deserving, has nothing to do with anything except that one of the drivers of the system is the quest for status. Giving up this quest is one way to begin to be free.

To the extent that people conflate advancement in the system with merit, they are apt also to deem wealthier or more powerful people more meritorious than poorer or less powerful people. And it is the meritorious who deserve to rule and who perpetuate the system within which they succeeded. Even many people who fail within the system buy into its logic and deem themselves to blame rather than problematizing the system. How much more enticing is the system to those who enjoy some measure of success and experience some social mobility?

The dominant culture decrees that merit brings prosperity; therefore, the prosperous are by definition meritorious. Even many among the less prosperous seem to believe this and deem themselves superior to those who are even poorer than themselves. There are surely strains of resistance in the popular culture in depictions of the powerful as evil, as unsatisfied by their success, as insatiable, as mad with power, as inhuman. Working folks are ennobled, and outlaws are glorified. It is themes of resistance in popular culture that the libertarian intelligentsia might address to deliver its message about the blessings of liberty. The powerful aren’t going to give up power; the masses have to strip it from them. And one thing to attack might be the notion of the powerful and their servants as meritorious. The truth is quite the opposite, and it should be told.
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