Yale Law professor, Daniel Markovits, wrote an article in The Atlantic magazine, a few years ago where he argued that meritocracy makes everyone miserable. The Harvard Gazette recently claimed that meritocracy is a myth. And the Princeton University Press has said that “belief in meritocracy is not only false, it is bad for you.” People on the left have also claimed, as usual, that meritocracy is a philosophy of white supremacy designed to keep people of color down. We used to be a country that embraced meritocracy. Most of the great things in our country were built through meritocracy. But more and more, we, as a society, are moving away from a merit-based system.
These types of attacks on meritocracy began with the introduction of the word, “equity” in place of “equality” in our societal conversations. “Equality” means treating everybody equal under the law. It prevents a multi-tiered justice system from emerging because everyone is treated the same regardless of what societal category they fall into. Equality will produce unequal outcomes because everyone has different abilities. Conversely, “equity” means artificially creating equal outcomes by treating everyone unequally under the law. Equity requires the creation of a multi-tiered justice system to produce the desired equal outcomes. The cost of “equity” will always be equality.
Equity disregards the merited outcomes and replaces them with the desired equal outcomes. It takes from someone one who has earned something and gives it to someone who has not earn it. People no longer have control over the outcomes in their lives because the outcomes are forgone conclusions. So, the straight A student who aced the SATs will not get accepted into a University because he didn’t check the correct equity boxes, while the B student who did okay on the SATs will get accepted because he did check the correct boxes. And that is how unmeritocratic equity works. Ability and achievement do not factor in as much as other considerations which artificially create the desired outcomes. The best examples of how meritocracy produces the best results is in professional sports where winning, defeating your opponent is preeminent.
Meritocracy used to be what drove American business, but slowly it is being replaced. The business world has been infiltrated by ESG, where investments in companies are valued and determined not by merit, but by how well the company lives up to politically correct woke standards. ESG is a form of equity which is poisoning the business world. In present day American society, “equity” is the Trojan horse used to usher in the communist ideology which believes, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”.
I always found it strangely ironic that the communists who reject meritocracy as a political philosophy, were also atheists. That doesn’t add up. Atheist believe in evolution because they do not believe in God, in a creator. They believe that evolution created all life on this planet based on the fundamental concepts of – “survival of the fittest” and “natural selection”. Every morning, a gazelle wakes up in the Serengeti knowing that he must run faster than the fastest lion to survive; and the lion wakes up knowing he must run faster than the slowest gazelle or he will starve to death. This is how evolution works and is why the gazelles and the lions have become some of the fastest animals on the planet. Evolution is meritocracy, and meritocracy is evolution. But communist reject meritocracy. Communism would reward the slowest animal and punish the fastest animal, and both lion and gazelle would get slower and weaker and more vulnerable.
How can you be an atheist and believe that the most meritocratic system, evolution, created all living things including the most complex machine on the planet, the human body, and then endorse the least meritocratic political system there is, communism? How can you believe that all of life was created by a random undirected process, and then want to create a system of central planners that make every decision for all people? It would appear that one cannot honesty believe in communism and also believe in evolution. They are contradictory philosophies.
The real reason why communists are also atheists is because they need to deny the existence of God, so they can assume the role of God in our lives because they have a deep-seated desire to dictate and determine the course of other people’s lives and of humanity as a whole. Communism is a megalomaniacal philosophy disguised as altruism. The goals of communism which are the end of meritocracy and the establishment of a tyrannical state, is one of the fears of the rise of artificial intelligence, and maybe why the most powerful people in the world are pushing for it. When robots and computers can do all the things, that human beings currently are doing and better, then meritocracy disappears. We won’t be able earn our way by merit and no longer determine the course of our own lives. We will become unnecessary. We will become weaker. We will become reliant and even a burden to the state. It is the end of meritocracy which will create the totalitarian state that the communists have long desired.
Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.