MERITOCRACY IS GOOD

 

 MERITOCRACY AND THE POPULIST WORLD

J C MEEROFF MD, PhD and S. MEEROFF BA

South Florida Institute of Integrative Medicine, USA

 

“If a man who has not been a socialist before 25 has no heart. If he remains one after 25 he has no head". King Oscar II of Sweden

"Misfortune is the test of a person's merit”. Seneca the younger

“Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit”.     PJ O’Rourke

“Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities.” Eric Reis

"It is the practice of all tyrants to rely on a natural but thoughtless feeling of the peoples, to dominate them". Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

 

INTRODUCTION

 

The conventional interpretation of meritocracy and the populist rhetoric deceptive version of meritocracy are two different things that even at times represent opposite concepts.

Here we argue that:

A. What populists describe as meritocracy is not truly meritocracy  but plutocracy.

B. Most of the western civilization does not endorse totalitarian forms of leadership; instead they accept conventional meritocracy in education, government, sports, economy and other fields as a democratic system of social amalgamation.

C. The populist distorted view of meritocracy is exercised dogmatically to discredit any democratic opposition to totalitarism

D. In the name of “war against liberal meritocracy” populists use a combination of oligarchy, totalitarism, kleptocracy, insultocracy and plutocracy to undermine the value of merit.

MERIT

 

Merit from the Latín term merĭtum is the quality of being good or worthy in a particular job and/or function so as to deserve praise and/or reward. Merit is earned and is the result of talent, education, hard work, effort, responsibility, achievement, solidarity and fervidness. Merit is opposite to obtaining privileges by force, special favors, trickery, deception or selfishness.

 

“Merit” was originally defined as “I.Q. plus effort,” but it has evolved to stand for a combination of cognitive abilities, extracurricular talents, and socially valuable personal qualities, like leadership and civic mindedness. Features such as race, religious/philosophical preferences, gender, physical force, and family fortune, should not be part of merit.

 

MERITOCRACY

Initially meritocracy was coined as a political system in which economic goods and/or political power are vested on individual people based on intelligence, talent, effort, and achievement, rather than wealth or class privileges. Advancement in such a system was based on performance, as measured through examination or demonstrated achievement. Although the concept of meritocracy has existed for centuries, the term itself was coined in 1958 by the British sociologist Michael Dunlop Young in his satirical essay “The Rise of the Meritocracy” and currently it is well engrained in most western societies.

 

The belief in meritocratic ideology is the belief that, in a particular system, success is an indicator of personal deservingness, and that the system rewards individual ability and efforts; in other words you must earn your rights not inheriting them.

 

Meritocracy refers to a regime in which authority is vested in those who can demonstrate virtues deemed pertinent to the organization (government, academia, sports, administration, etc.). Often, these merits are conferred through education, testing, performance and academic credentials. They are meant to create an order in which talent, abilities, productivity, commitment and intellect determine who should hold positions of leadership and receive economic rewards. The result is a social hierarchy based on achievement.

“Meritocracy, in contemporary parlance, refers to the idea that whatever our social position at birth, society ought to facilitate the means for talent to rise to the top.”

 

 

TOTALITARISM, OLIGARCHY, KLEPTOCRACY, INSULTOCRACY AND PLUTOCRACY

 

Totalitarianism is an authoritarian form of government in which the ruling groups recognize no limitations whatsoever to their power, either in their public life or over the private rights of the citizens. Ultimate power is often vested in the hands of a single figure, an authority around whom significant propaganda is built as a way of extending and retaining uncontested authority. Totalitarian states often employ widespread surveillance, control over mass media, intimidating demonstrations of paramilitary or police power, and violent suppression of protest, activism, or political opposition.

 

Oligarchy refers to a form of government in which a small group of individuals rule over a nation. In many ways, oligarchy is a catch-all for any number of other forms of governance in which a specific set of qualities — wealth, heredity, race — are used to vest power in a minuscule group of individuals. Therefore, forms of government regarded as aristocratic, plutocratic, or totalitarian, can be referred to as oligarchic. Oligarchies are often characterized by tyrannical or authoritarian rule and the absence of democratic practices or respect for individual rights.

 

Kleptocracy is a form of government in which the ruling group has either come to power, retained power, or both, through means of corruption and theft. This is not a form of government that a ruling class would ever self-apply but a pejorative term used to describe a group whose power rests on a foundation of corruption such as embezzlement, clientelism, and misappropriation of funds. In kleptocracy there is usually transfer of massive amounts of wealth from public to private interests. These private interests will typically overlap the ruling party/group own economic interests.

 

Insultocracy is a form of leadership where the ruling power maintain their authority by untruthfulness, duplicity and noisily insulting everybody who attempts to present a different point of view. Insultocrats  use the worst foul language known and threat opponents with the most despicable sort of retaliatory actions. This cause opponents to be afraid and scared to react. In fact,  they remain in a state of mental/psychological panic. There is scientific evidence of an increase use of foul, insulting language among Alzheimer’s disease patients. On the other side,  it has been argued, but not proven, that the use of foul language helps the person who insults to feel better and be more honest. The term insultocracy was originally coined by the pro-democratic media in Ghana at the beginning of the XXI century. Currently it is possible to identify insultocrats all over the globe.

 

Plutocracy (from the Greek ploutos, 'wealth' and  kratos, 'power') or plutarchy is a political system where society is ruled or controlled by people of great wealth or income.

 

 

POPULISM 

Populism is an approach utilized by certain political factions to appeal to “ordinary people” who feel that their concerns are disregarded by the “established elite groups”. Although populist leaders often present themselves as representatives of "the common people", they often belong to some elite class and care less about the fate of “the people”. The goal of populist politics is to dominate and to have unrestricted power. The populist leaders pretend to stand in opposition to an enemy, often personified by a democratic system or attack the "liberal elite". Populism is a strategy employed by corrupt individuals to gain power using fake democracy as the façade for their authoritarian regimes. 

Populism undermines democracy from inside. Populism pretend to defend the democratic process by disguising as democratic but instead it use the electoral process to gain incontestable power ("we go for everything") and in this way eliminate all features of a representative republic.

The 5 main characteristics of contemporary populism include:

     -- A fierce totalitarian state allowing limited individual freedom

     -- A charismatic leadership

     -- The use of strong verbose dialectic rhetoric exploiting the idea that all problems are caused by the “liberal elite” never by their own mistakes. Populist leaders "suffer from diarrhea of words but have constipation of ideas”

     -- Negation of the concept of quality vs quantity. Everything must be plateau at the lower level of competency to keep "the people" unable to react

     -- A strong and convenient tolerance for corruption, injustice, violence and crime

 

POPULIST RETHORIC

Rhetoric is the art of effective or persuasive speaking and/or writing, notably the use of metaphors, figures of speech, fake dialectics and other compositional techniques.

In recent times the new populist class have been using a deceptive interpretation of meritocracy to disguise their own preference for totalitarism, kleptocracy, insultocracy and/or plutocracy to discredit the positive components of merit.

The populist image of meritocratic inequality, in their well-rehearsed populist rhetoric, claim that meritocracy is biased and exacerbate inequality. The method works like this: First populist rulers entertain the idea that merit workers “unfairly” acquire super-skilled jobs, displacing middle-class labor from the center of economic production. Then, those elite workers use their “massive incomes” to monopolize elite education for their children, ensuring that their offspring are more qualified to dominate high-skilled industries than their middle-class counterparts. The cycle continues, generating what Markovits calls “snowball inequality”: a compounding feedback loop that amplifies economic inequality, dramatically suppresses social mobility, and creates a “time divide” between an elite class whose members work longer and longer (due to a higher demand for their talents) and an increasingly idle middle class whose work has been made redundant. 

This representation of meritocracy is not only misleading but erroneous since what we have described above is just plain totalitarism and not real meritocracy. This way to denigrate conventional meritocracy serve to justify populist own motivation for the creation of a society ruled by an oligarchic system of kraterocracy, insultocracy, and kleptocracy where merit is abolished and power is concentrated in the hands of a few despotic “nuveau riches”. With a technique based on the concept that “it is not import  what I say, what is important, it is who I am”. everything is equalized at the lowest level of competence and efficiency. 

Latin America, a part of the world that can be seen as the birthplace of modern populism, has plenty of examples of totalitarian regimes of government such as Castrism, Chavism, Madurism, Kirshnerism and Ivoism. The new populist dominant class is a class recognized by its ownership and its special relations with the other classes. The new class is composed by those few who have special privileges and powers plus economic advantages because of their administrative responsibilities in the given structure of authority. Their primary motto is “in the name of the people, what is yours is mine, but what is mine is mine”. They also do charity using stolen, embezzled and/or, misappropriated money (charity with someone else's pocket). 

Populism may have been around for centuries but we can admit that modern populism has its own contemporary roots in the 20th Century in Latin America. We found evidence of the use of populist meritocratic inequity rhetoric in Argentina during the last leg of WWII (1944-1945). Then the Argentine labor movement confronted university students using the slogan "Alpargatas si, libros no" ("Espadrilles yes, textbooks no"). In the late 1940's such catchphrase was the motto of the labor trade unions during JD Peron first presidency, a concept apparently not supported by Peron himself. Recently the most intemperate Peronist factions (Menemism, Kirchnerism, and Camporism) have resurfaced the concept of populist meritocratic inequality not to improve meritocracy but simply to criticize the liberal opposition.

In the US heavy social and political pressure lead by some academicians from elite universities, particularly in the Economy and the Law fields, insist in demeaning the value of merit arguing that merit itself is prejudicial and/or unfair to middle and lower classes, but they are yet unable to provide for an alternative system, if it exists, to correct the conceivable inequities created by meritocracy.

CONCLUSIONS

Within democratic organizations merit and meritocracy are valuable concepts. Moreover, meritocratic systems need improvements to eliminate all aspects of class inequity and/or discriminatory practices. The race for merit must be based in equal opportunity and parity of resources for everybody, that it is, unfortunately, not always the case. Research and practice will aid improving meritocratic systems. Nevertheless, destroying meritocracy by adopting any form of totalitarian systems will not conduct to success and/or progress in any form of human activity.

 

 

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 Copyright 2020 © JCMeeroff, MD, PhD.             All rights reserved.

 

 

 How to cite this article

 Meeroff JC & MEEROFF S(2020). Meritocracy and the populist world. https://www.meeroffmedicine.com/articles/Meritocracy is good