Merit Vs Meritocracy

Why merit will never matter and the best don’t rise to the top

I believe that, like many other good-sounding ideas, meritocracies do not work well in real life. The reader might ask-

Why not? Aren’t meritocratic societies affluent/ stable/ progressive etc.

My answer is-

A society that promotes people based on demonstrated merit and competence is not a meritocracy. Meritocracies almost always preselect their “elites” through processes and rituals that have little or no linkage with reality.

How many of you will ever work on projects without using printed reference material or notes? But aren’t exams in schools and universities based on memorization or solving standard problems within artificial constraints? What about cooperating with others to solve problems? While it is not allowed in exams, it is absolutely necessary in real life.

Does regurgitating the brain farts of ‘famous’ and long-dead Chinese, Indian or White men make you smarter or a better problem solver? But aren’t many areas of human activity, such as economics, based on repeating and explaining the rantings of morons who lived in a world unlike ours?

Entrance exams to ‘professional’ scams such as medicine, law etc are supposed to select for clever people. But then why are ‘iatrogenic events’ the 3rd-4th largest cause of death? Aren’t they competent? Why are physicians so dependent on information from cheerleaders turned sales reps and ‘senior’ doctors? Can they not think for themselves?

What about lawyers? Aren’t most of them just sloppy sociopaths who, in a simpler time, would have been killed in hunting accidents? Where is the competence, ability or social utility?

To conclude this post- Any supposed surrogate marker for ability and competence is really, at best, a vague indicator of potential. Societies and civilizations start stagnating when they start using such proxies of ability or competence, over actually giving people adequate chances to prove themselves.