The Incoherence of Meritocracy

Who should rule? Perhaps you think the answer is spelled out in the concept of a meritocracy, of a society run by those who excel on account of their ability and talent. The elites in a meritocracy are meant to be the opposite of plutocrats who buy power and of aristocrats who inherit power regardless of their aptitude.

“Meritocracy,” though, is a curious concept. Even in an aristocracy, the rulers do excel—at being selfish, spoiled, aloof, and indolent. An aristocrat would be incompetent at improving the lives of the peasants and slave labourers who support the empire, if that were the empire’s purpose, but a royal can inspire as a symbol of how arbitrary power corrupts character. Or take the kleptocracy, the society in which political power is stolen. The thieves in charge still excel—at conning the masses and wasting the natural resources. Or take an even more obvious case of a society supposedly run by impostors who don’t deserve their power, the kakistocracy which, by definition, is a society run by the worst persons. Again, these rulers would be abysmal, morally speaking, but that’s not to say they would be bereft of any talent. Con artists, for example, excel at selling, which is to say at deceiving and at restricting their perspective to their primitive, selfish urges as a result of their lack of empathy.

Only in a country in which power is handed out randomly would we expect the rulers to have no common skills. An aristocracy comes close to that scenario, because the randomness inherent to sexual reproduction is a factor in the bestowing of political power along a bloodline. That randomness, though, is balanced by the upper-class institutions that rear the royal child and by absolute power’s natural tendency to monstrify the powerful person, so that aristocratic personalities and talents do resemble each other. For example, aristocrats are all rich and they live in castles and have sycophantic servants; they also receive top-notch education, they’re famous from birth and know they won’t face immediate oblivion in the history books, unlike most people who ever lived, so aristocrats have to adapt to that common environment.

Amoral, Moral, and Mixed Meritocracies

These complications point to a more fundamental problem with meritocracy, which is that the concept might be incoherent. After all, ruling or governing implies some degree of coercion, of exercising power over others. If the kind of merit that’s relevant to a meritocracy were determined by moral criteria, the moral elites might be poor candidates for that job since they’d be inclined to avoid committing even the slightest infraction of the citizens’ rights. Depending on which skills are relevant to the task of ruling over the masses, or to speak euphemistically, of “governing the nation’s affairs,” some who’ve earned various merits might be the worst candidates for a political position. This would be the political realist’s perspective, which has recently entered popular culture via the success of “Game of Thrones.” The notion of a meritocracy, then, almost serves as a weasel word for obscuring these preliminary questions of the purpose of government and of which talents are suited to fulfilling that purpose.

“Democracy,” “aristocracy,” “plutocracy,” “meritocracy”—all such terms are based on the Greek word for “rule” or “government.” If ruling a nation were inherently a dirty business, the talents required to excel in that field would be those shown to best effect in the most amoral political systems such as a kleptocracy or a plutocracy. By contrast, were the goal of government to elevate the quality of the citizens so that they’d no longer need to be guided or ruled, the desired endpoint being anarchy, the rulers would have to be averse to exercising political power; that is, the rulers would dedicate themselves to the dominance hierarchy’s dissolution, by selflessly enhancing the citizens’ ability to govern themselves. Perhaps, instead, the purpose of government is to feign having a lofty purpose while secretly deferring to amoral natural probabilities, as in the case of a pseudo-democracy that rationalizes its plutocratic effects.

How the relevant talents are measured will depend on government’s ultimate purpose. Were the political purpose amoral, as in a “realistic,” natural society in which the strong dominate the weak, the talents could be measured by the results. Who is demonstrably the strongest, most sociopathic member of society? That individual would deserve to rule in that he or she would be fittest to fulfill that social purpose. Talk of “merit” in such a society would be instrumental, of course, since moral values are shams from a naturalistic, Game of Thrones perspective. This is to say that merit in that system would have to do with efficiency, with picking the best means of achieving a goal. The goal itself would be neither good nor bad but would merely obtain as a natural fact. Such amorality would appall those who take seriously the conventional fictions that flatter them. In any case, you wouldn’t need to test the citizens in the systematic Chinese manner to measure their amorality, since the most Machiavellian citizens would likely be infamous.

Even those who prefer to keep their social manipulations covert could be awarded the honour of deserving to rule an amoral society, given the evidence of their privately-amassed wealth. The assumption would be that great wealth is never acquired on a moral basis. That, however, raises the question whether those most deserving to exploit or to oppress the masses would be inclined to take the job, since political responsibilities might impede their pettier cons. In nature, the strongest or most cunning member of the group takes power by displaying dominance and beating back challenges to his or her privileges. But it’s an open question whether the greatest human villain would be the individual who tends to acquire political power, given that only amoral standards apply to the political process. Dictators or mafia bosses often mirror the beastly struggle for power in the jungle, taking power as they do by bloody coups. But capitalism allows for greater profit to be made from private forms of sociopathy, as compared with public ones.

Suppose, however, we confine our interest to moral meritocracies. In that case, would the Chinese test-based system be best for picking the elites? Not necessarily, because Chinese meritocracy is pragmatic, not moralistic. The political goal in China is for the elites to be competent in ensuring that the social system functions smoothly, so that China’s meritocracy is largely technocratic. Education is a condition of competence in that instrumental sense, and test-taking is part of the process of acquiring an education. How, then, would you measure the moral skills that would be relevant to governing a compassionate society? The procedure here would seem to be the opposite of the one employed in the ruthless, amoral meritocracy. You’d search the streets for the least powerful citizens who are in the business of sacrificing their personal interests for altruistic reasons. That isn’t to say the poorest, least successful members would automatically deserve to rule, since some homeless people, for example, might prefer to be wealthy and might have only failed in business. But you could do worse than to scour charities and homeless shelters, taking care, though, to exclude those who are in the altruistic habit for religious reasons, since the promise of reward in the afterlife vitiates the do-gooder’s selflessness.

Having found such selfless individuals, you might wonder why there was any such need to look for them in the first place. If we assume the social interest in morality is genuine, the most scrupulous members might be expected to rise automatically to political power in such an altruistic environment. The problem would be that free-riders would exploit the good intentions of such a system, make a show of their phony empathy, and compete for the “throne.” Of course, there should be no throne, no symbol of dominance in a nation that prides itself on its unnatural values. But as long as genuine altruists have to live with even a minority of sociopaths, the latter will have the upper hand until natural, regressive instincts and compromises are eliminated from interpersonal relationships. In any case, even if the most deserving members wouldn’t automatically rise to the pinnacle of a compassionate society, in principle you could distinguish the genuine saint from the fraud, and the former would obviously deserve to “rule” in such a society.

What, though, would “ruling over others” mean in that case? Perhaps the moral leader would serve only as a guide or inspiration, like a guru. The nation would be like a giant cult except that instead of worshipping the dear leader, as in North Korea, the goal would be to help others or to do what’s otherwise right in the moral sense. A better comparison would be with a charity. Imagine that instead of a capitalistic economy, the system were about elevating those who are worse off. Suppose this egalitarian goal were achieved and business were conducted not for private profit or for the sake of empowering some at the expense of others, but—should any inequality be tolerated—to elevate the lives of others at the expense of yours. It’s hard to see how anyone would have a right to rule over such a society, since the public would have altogether abandoned politics. The citizens would govern themselves; there would be no conflicts calling for mere pragmatic solutions, since the majority, at least, would do the right thing. Mind you, happiness would be paradoxical in that heaven on earth, as shown at the end of “Schindler’s List,” when Oscar Schindler is horrified to realize that he could have done more to save Jews from the Nazi Holocaust. Those who care more about increasing the happiness of others than about enjoying their life might be pleased to act selflessly, but they wouldn’t be content until all injustices had been eradicated. An entire society of altruists might be as tortured as a knight errant, thrusting himself into danger at personal risk, in pursuit of a greater good. The point, though, is that a saintly society wouldn’t be a meritocracy, since the government wouldn’t rule over the citizens.

Short of such utopia, a coercive government would seem to be required because of inadequate self-guidance on the part of the majority of citizens in a more realistic (natural or animalistic) society. If most people are incapable of doing what’s right in their private life, they’re hardly likely to act in the nation’s best interest or for the good of the planet. The government is supposed to step in to rectify that deficiency. In an incompletely-moral nation, then, a meritocratic system would be one governed by elites who excel in deciding when to put aside morality by way of reconciling themselves to the imperfections of the system and of the population. These elites would be expert at oscillating between moral and amoral, pragmatic frameworks, and at covering up the contradictions between them. In short, this would encompass the fraudulent sort of society, the one that might truly earn the oxymoronic title of “meritocracy,” since the value of merit would be belied by the natural call for political rule and thus for systematic social inequality.

Again, those who “deserve” to rule in an amoral society, because they’re the most selfish and powerful and villainous couldn’t consistently speak of that honour, because there would be no such thing as value or merit in such a primitive setting. There would be only natural probabilities, causal relationships, and a horrific lack of vindication by any greater plan. The alpha male wolf might be physically the most vicious member of the pack, and you could go on to compare the skills of the other wolves, but there would be no merit or greatness in any of those skills. The value of those skills would be as illusory as the intelligent design of the wolf’s body type. Thus, to say that the strong “earn the right” to rule over the weak would be nonsensical, from the perspective of the strongest individual who’s eschewed the concept of a good greater than self-interest. In short, ethical egoism and social Darwinism suffer from a performative self-contradiction if they’re taken to imply that selfish profit-seeking is best; that is, we mustn’t confuse amorality with evil. There’s no evil in a system in which certain natural talents are exploited to achieve selfish advantage over the majority, such as by some massive con or theft or brutal coup. The behaviour in a social system that’s easily explained in its entirety in sociobiological terms is amoral.

By the same token, in an unnatural society, governed by moral ideals rather than by biological norms, there’s plenty of value but no politics. Only in the interim system that goes back and forth between high-minded concerns and regressive instincts might you have prescription and politics, an ideal dictating what ought to be done and a lapse into fight-or-flight, social dominance, or other animal tactics. The trick would be to preserve an interest in morality while observing the ease with which most people fall well short of their ideals. For example, keeping the American dream alive in spite of the farce of the Trump presidency might be beyond the human capacity for rationalization. When animal patterns intrude on a more rarified artificial endeavor, we have a tragedy. So when a democracy—which is supposed to be a system in which the majority rule (on account of most people’s success in governing themselves)—declines and turns into an authoritarian spectacle, ideality is overrun by politics. The American liberal ideal, deriving from Enlightenment philosophy, is proven to be a mere transient artwork like the Notre Dame cathedral which can burn to ashes at any moment. When most Americans and Europeans no longer believe in liberalism, because they’ve witnessed the self-sacrificial consequences of economic globalism, as poor countries are elevated at the expense of middleclass jobs in the richer ones, they lash out as animals, trolling the elites and craving an anarchic do-over, as in Brexit, Trump’s aristocratic “presidency,” or other such suicidal fiascos.

As to who should rule in these half-hearted countries in which faith in the greater good is waning, most fitting would be elites who likewise pretend to care about what should be done, whereas they excel at doing what must be done according to sociobiological, animal law. These elites would be animals wearing human masks, like George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatives,” otherwise known well as neocons. Conceivably, an elite leader of a mixed (moral but flawed) meritocracy might have a genuine interest in moral ideals, and might lament the need to compromise with natural tendencies. But the more compromises the technocrat must make with natural reality, the more jaded she would become. Persistent faith in an unnatural ideal in the face of flagrant daily violations, on account of nature’s palpable indifference to what should be done would require a type of mania or other insanity that might disqualify the individual from a leadership role in a meritocracy. So the elites in a mixed meritocracy would tend to be con artists, masters of what Leo Strauss and Plato called the noble lie. Their greatest merit would be their ability to pretend that progress is feasible or that a flawed population is likely to adopt worthy principles in the first place.

In summary, there are evidently three types of meritocracies, depending on whether the leader’s merit is amoral, moral, or an untenable combination of the two. In either case, the concept of “rule by merit” isn’t strictly coherent. The politics overwhelm the values, the values obviate the need for politics, or a synthesis is maintained on the basis of a fraud, as in a half-hearted appeal to liberal values of personal freedom that fly in the face of plutocratic and technological realities.