Meritorious or Just Obedient?

Kevin Carson posts about folks who blame the masses for their own degradation: http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2007/01/you-dont-get-to-be-pharoah-by-working.html

It seems clear to me that the myth of the meritocracy is a means for the ruling elite to persuade the smarter proles to identify their interests with the elites rather than their working class comrades. Middle managers, such as myself, are taught to think of ourselves as successes by virtue of our worthiness and merit. Those poor slobs who aren’t as successful have only themselves to blame, since the system that advances us is nothing more than an unbiased mechanism for sorting folks into categories of the worthy and the unworthy. That being the case, the elites above us must be the worthiest of all.

This myth inspires us to work to maintain the system. We are convinced of the necessity of the state to keep the unworthy in line and to manage their affairs down to the most niggling detail. That this impairs our own freedom does not occur to us because we have already surrendered it voluntarily like well trained domesticated animals. We love the leash and take delight in the praise of our masters. We enjoy our relatively better appointed homes and the other rewards of our relative prosperity and think we are the right kind of people.

We don’t pass much time with the elites themselves. We may get glimpses of the fringes of the power elite from time to time, so we don’t realize just how far above us in wealth and power they are. This allows us to think that we are more like them than those folks lower down on the socioeconomic scale with whom we actually have much more in common.

If the meritocratic system does not sort for merit, what does it sort for? Domestication.