So, I'm reading a book on meritocracy. I'll probably review it when I'm done, but so far I'm just giving blurbs of my thoughts so far and how my ideology intersects with the idea of meritocracy.
As I said, meritocracy is somewhat of a good thing, and somewhat of a necessity, as I personally believe with no intrinsic reward system, there is no motivation. I believe a failure of "communism" as it was practiced was that it did go too hard in replacing the motivation system that exists within capitalism with something that flat out did not work.
We do need a system that rewards people when they do good things. I just dispute that we need a system that punishes people for not conforming to it either.
Americans (and the rest of the world, as the book put it) are obsessed with meritocracy to the point that it represents a just world hypothesis. Those who are successful by their own merits, and as an expression of their intrinsic virtue and dedication to the work ethic. Those who are not successful deserve to suffer and be miserable, because they lack these qualities.
I personally do not like such a system because I dont believe people deserve to suffer simply for not conforming to some weird set of morals or virtues. Morality exists to serve people, people do not exist to serve it, this is a weird fundamentalist christian conception of morality, and imposing this on people system wide amounts to their enslavement. Like, this is the problem with virtue ethics. Rather than morality being a thing applied to the human experience to enhance it, it puts the onus on the individual to conform to an arbitrary set of values, and then it expects people to be judged as good or bad by their conformity, with the good being rewarded and the bad being punished.
Such a system has no inherent value on its own. Its only value is its utility, and even more so, its necessity. Does life, human nature, etc, necessitate that we have a system in which people are rewarded in accordance with the work they put in? I would argue to an extent. But that's the thing, it depends on the extent necessary.
Do we NEED the massive inequality we have in the US for our society to function? Arguably no. If anything, our level of inequality is extreme and not aligned with other capitalist nations. Do we need to make the poor suffer in order to make our economy work? This is going to be controversial, but once again, I would say no. And if it's not ABSOLUTELY necessary, I would argue that the minimum quality of life should be as high as society can bear.
Heck, I would argue in a system in which labor is not needed, perhaps it is more just that we are all equal, like under a so called "communistic" system where people are given the same regardless of efforts. The arguments FOR capitalism, and FOR meritocracy, and FOR inequality are primarily functionalist, and they are only valid insofar as they are needed to fulfill their function.
We live in a society in which some labor is necessary. I disagree on the extent to which is necessary, and long for a world in which labor becomes increasingly unnecessary, rather than keeping the same system going, suffering and all, for as long as possible. I dont value meritocracy in and of itself. I dont believe that society should inherently have winners and losers. I think a system of winners and losers is just necessary for optimal functioning, and I do believe that the life of the so called "losers" should be as dignified as humanly possible. Phillippe Van Parijs, in arguing, for his "real libertarian" mindset, generally supported the idea of basic income being set at the highest sustainable level. Sustainable is the key word. None of my ideas are worth anything if they cannot work and cannot be sustained. But if they can be, then yes, they are more moral. There is no moral justification to allow people to suffer if the suffering is not needed. Such a system is just cruel and should be replaced with a more compassionate system. Having a system that imposes suffering people for no good reason in pursuit of an ideal divorced from human well being and needs is inherently unjust and arbitrary in my view.
As such, yes, I do believe in meritocracy to some extent. But meritocracy fits well within my idea of human centered capitalism, that people don't exist for the economy, the economy exists for people, and that jobs are a means to an end, not an end in itself. Meritocracy for its own sake flies square in the face of these ideals. It means that people are slaves to the economy or an inhuman system that doesn't serve them, and it forces people to work for its own sake, to avoid suffering, when the suffering could be avoided simply by recognizing jobs for what they are, something that exists to create the goods and services we need.
We need to get rid of this weird christian idea of virtue ethics that our society is based upon. And yes I would say its largely christian, given all of this is just an extension of the original protestant work ethic. I mean, in a secular moral system the roles of these ideas is clear. They exist to serve a higher purpose, that being to create a better life for people, and if they happen to make society worse and do not lead to the best of all possible worlds we could be living under (meaning such suffering is unnecessary), then they should be abandoned in favor of that better system.
Given my own system attempts to balance the need for meritocracy with its practical limits, and tries to make a better world without "killing the golden goose", I view my ideals as worth considering instead. A world in which those who do not conform to a system of ethics that is arbitrary are punished for not doing so is a world that is cruel and authoritarian. It puts arbitrary ideals above the actual consequences of those ideals. And rather than making the world better, they make it worse.
This isn't even touching the topic that our system LITERALLY cant even guarantee that everyone who works hard is rewarded. Our system IS based in large part on luck, starting position, etc. And most people including liberals and even leftists like to do this dance of being like "well we need to reward work and we need equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome", when in some ways we do need both. Equality of opportunity is important, yes, but to some extent, the scale of the range of outcomes is too. If those at the bottom suffer more than needed for society to function and inequality is far larger than it needs to be for society to properly function, then yes, the state should step in to make the outcomes somewhat more equal. In this sense it might mean those who are richest might only make hundreds of times more than the poorest, rather than literally thousands of times. I mean, that's still enough to reward effort and motivate people, isn't it? So yes, I am intentionally bypassing the question of simply focusing on equality of opportunity. Because we focus too much on opportunity. And at the end of the day, it just comes off as dystopian that we have to work at all just to justify our existence if such a thing is not necessary. That we value work and merit to such an extent that we talk more about "creating opportunity" and jobs rather than just giving poor people their freaking needs. Why do we have to have a system where people have to suffer just to meet their needs? Our society is sick. And the equality of opportunity people still miss the point. We need to go further than that and question the idea of meritocracy itself and really ask, in this modern era, how much of this is really necessary? I'd argue that while it's necessary to some extent, it isn't necessary to the extent in which we practice it, and putting it over our very humanity is a perversion of what morals, ethics, and social structures are actually supposed to do.
If anything should have to work to continually justify their existence, it's our social structures, not people.
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