What has meritocracy to do with merit? [View all]

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http://www.opednews.com/articles/What-has-meritocracy-to-do-by-Prakash-Kona-Creativity_Intelligence_People_Power-140531-279.html

What has meritocracy to do with merit?
By Prakash Kona
General News 5/31/2014 at 12:20:58

I ought to rephrase the question and ask instead: when did meritocracy ever have anything to do with merit? The answer is simple: Never. Merit is one of those ambiguous, overused phrases applied to anyone who does well within a particular system. I am not commenting on individual traits that someone might be endowed with. Some people are born to be John Lennons and some others to be George Carlins. The merit I am talking about is not with reference to unusually gifted people. In fact that's not what merit is all about. Merit is about intelligence that is attributed as being natural to certain individuals because they do well within a system. The attribution of intelligence is usually done without any reference to the system itself.

~snip~

Meritocracies are about social and economic ladders and not about merit, if we redefined merit to include survival-related abilities such as adaptation for instance. In the face of majoritarian onslaught, social, political, sexual and economic minorities show unbelievable abilities to sustain themselves. Shouldn't that qualify for merit? What about the resilience of working class women in the face of brutal male violence? If that is not merit what is? I mean we could think of countless such instances of real merit that has nothing to do with a university degree or grades or of going to a top American college that the middle classes are obsessed with.

The argument in favor of a meritocracy has completely failed and it is pointless to offer a detailed exposition in that regard. It is a fundamentally biased one that prioritizes certain professions such as medicine and engineering and ignores the rest. More importantly, corporate-based meritocracy is the kind of skilled labor or talent that corporations need for their existence. They define taste through the media both in the arts and performance industry. They define what beauty is all about. They also define how rewards must be distributed to individuals based on their merit which is about subscribing to a set of values and attitudes more than mere possession of intelligence.

Meritocracy is another way of globalizing caste system by creating a system of social stratification separating the inferior from the superior. It is a way of making sure that the downtrodden, apart from the token few, never aspire to what by virtue of the system will go to those who inherit both wealth and power.