How "meritocracy" went from a joke to a dogma, and destroyed the lives of everyone it touched

The term "meritocracy" was coined in Michael Young's satirical 1958 novel, "The Rise of Meritocracy," where it described a kind of self-delusion in which rich people convinced themselves that their wealth was evidence of their moral superiority; it's well-documented that a belief in meritocracy makes you act like an asshole, and also makes you incapable of considering how much of your good fortune is attributable to luck; now, in a new book, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite, Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits documents how a belief in meritocracy also makes rich people totally miserable.

Meritocracy poses our society as a finite game with winners and losers, and its circular reasoning ("the best people succeed, therefore anything you do to succeed makes you better than the people who lose") creates an endless drive to destroy yourself with workaholism and to ruin the lives of the people around you with cheating (think of the parents who ruined their kids lives by bribing them into top institutions).

Meritocracy also turns you into a eugenicist, because the only way to reconcile your ability to grift your kids to the front of the line even though they've done nothing to deserve pride of place is to invest in a belief in "good blood": you succeeded because of your in-born meritocratic grit and gumption, so your kids deserve to succeed because they inherited that trait from you. In other words, "meritocracy" starts in a belief that deeds are evidence of worth, but ends up being a belief that blood is your evidence of worth: a doctrine that is supposed to be anti-aristocratic ends up reinventing the aristocracy (this is why Whuffie is a terrible idea). Read the rest