The Game is Rigged: Merit Doesn’t Equate Moral Deservedness

Every now and then, there are stories in the media about successful entrepreneurs and the people who “made” it to the top with their hard work and efforts. It seems like an attractive dream, but it can’t be more than just a dream. The reality is that these so-called self-made millionaires have never experienced a single day of poverty. It is true that they might be in bad financial conditions in terms of fluid capital in the bank account, but they were never even near to poverty when one analyzes their social, ethnic, racial, and genetic capital. In case somebody is not sure about these economic terms, let me explain a bit more.

In order to understand the dynamics of economic inequality, one has to ponder on the concept of monetary system. A monetary system is a system of exchange devised to keep track of one’s contributions towards the society and the liability that society has in return of the goods and services that one renders to the society. Due to impractical nature of the barter trading, currency system was adopted instead of barter system in the distant past. It has been a better way of exchange indeed, however, it also has caused a great inequality and unnatural suffering. The barter system dealt only with the present and didn’t have a mechanism to store the value/earnings for future use. Currency system allowed people to store value and pass it down to coming generations. This means that future generations didn’t start from scratch but had an unprecedented advantage over the other people in the market. It didn’t matter how the money was generated but rather how it was stored. This resulted in feudalism and oligarchy.

Due to industrialization and renaissance, there came a shift from wealthy individuals to wealthy nations. The concept remained the same, only it was the nations that stored the “value” in terms of currency. Again, it didn’t matter how nations acquired those resources which resulted in creation of value and thus economic gains but only how they stored it for use in the future. Just like how an individual feudal or an oligarch passed down the wealth down to their descendants, nations passed down the wealth to their citizens.

Now we live in the future, every ethnic/racial group has inherited an invisible resource of power, privilege or poverty depending on their initial belonging to the group at the time of the birth. This power and privilege is not just limited to business success but it appears in all walks of life. One with least privilege can find it hard to even land a job and make ends meet let alone survive in the business world which is epitome of capitalistic oppression & exploitation.

The odds of winning the game are less than winning a lottery for the underprivileged in the current systems of power, privilege and oppression.

This is not to deny that there exist poor people in every ethnic or racial group, but this means that even if somebody is apparently born poor but has inherited the power group, one starts way ahead of others in the world regardless of whether one uses that invisible well of prosperity or not. Furthermore, merely being of certain ethnicity increases one’s success substantially in the job market and grants one the opportunities that are unavailable to the people from other underprivileged groups.

Now back to the original discussion about apparently self-made entrepreneurs and rich people. It is oxymoron in and of itself, because, in order to “succeed” in the current monetary system, one has to be already a success in the system in some way. It might not be necessarily a monetary success, but it has to be social, political or genetic success. In order to further understand this, let’s take an example of an entrepreneur who is apparently poor in economic terms. First that entrepreneur must be a genetic success so as to come up with a groundbreaking idea that is ahead of its time. Then for the idea to succeed, one also need to be social success. Not even a brilliant idea survives if market rejects it. Markets are not driven by rationality or objectivity, and this is why they never favour creativity or originality. This means that for somebody to be a social success, one has to be perceived as an individual from within the group. This further solidifies the claim that how this new system of apparent self-determination is nothing more than a disguised version of feudalism and oligarchy whereby wealth is being passed down the descendants within a broader group instead of immediate descendants.

Now the question of value creation and contribution to the society. In the older barter system, the contribution used to be clear due to the clear demarcation of roles of each family in the tribe. Due to industrialization, the roles shifted from family-oriented occupation to a worker within a larger enterprise. With the advent of technology and automation systems, many traditional roles of the industrial age have disappeared once again, and society is becoming more and more like tribalism. This has direct impact on the concept of value creation and current monetary system. This means that the wealth creation and transfer is becoming more and more feudalistic and oligarchic whereby group affiliation matters more than ever for monetary success. This further connects to the earlier point that often the self-made rich are not really self-made at all but rather they had inherited the social and ethnic capital due to their invisible affiliation with the group.

This is not an attempt to discourage people from achieving success and greatness, but it is a necessary reminder for all those self-aggrandizing successful people that how far off are they from reality. It is not necessarily the individual efforts that bring about the success, but it is a multitude of factors that contribute towards an individual’s success most of which are not even in one’s conscious awareness or control. So, why then should all the credit be given to the person who is/becomes successful?