The Meritocracy Is Morally Bankrupt

by EW Wilder

Bakhtin Professor of Literary Economics at Purewater University

Today's leaders are haunted by the bad ideas of the 1990s.

From banking deregulation to globalization, the Clinton/Obama-wing of the Democratic Party and what was once known as the “mainstream” of the GOP seem to agree on a core set of principles that became ascendant in the last decade of the 20th Century. These ideas cleave to the aspirational motives and related governmental policies that foster the habits of mind of the so-called “strivers”: people whose life stories have been cast and recast as exemplars of the “American Dream” of overcoming the odds and succeeding (almost always financially) despite hardship and through hard work and dedication.

At the core of this ideology is the notion of the “meritocracy.” Thomas Frank recently described the meritocracy as the idea that the most competent people would (read “should”) get promoted in the workplace, and presumably, by extension, in the social world. Variously, the same idea has been used to justify giving a pass to “talent” of all sorts, even in the face of demonstrable disasters caused by the application of said “talent,” not the least of these on Wall Street over the last 15 years.

For most people my age and younger, the meritocracy is something of a joke. We have seen hacks take over everything from the music industry to academe, from publishing to the presidency itself.

Generation X was, after all, the first generation since the Great Depression to do worse than the generation before, not because we were “slackers,” as everyone said, but because of ever-narrowing opportunities—many of those narrowings justified by the very bad ideas of the '90s that are still in vogue. The stats need not be repeated here, but ought to be touched on: American corporations have outsourced nearly all their manufacturing capacities overseas, content to only own brands and not actually make stuff; Walmart and other massive retailers have put downward pressure on ordinary work, to the degree that a grocery worker is now making exactly the same wage in real dollars that she made in the late 1970s; and the tech jobs that promised us fun workplaces and scads of leisure time disappeared with the tech bust of the early 2000s.

But as ballyhooed as these facts have been, particularly by the liberal press, the facts have always been against meritocratic principles. Even in the halcyon days of US manufacturing, it was still a good idea to know somebody in the factory if you wanted to get work there: despite what our high-school guidance counselors told us, we were always better off relying on the strengths of our networks than the persuasiveness of our résumés.

And here we have hit upon the most practical of the problems with the meritocracy: it doesn't, and can't, exist as advertised. First of all, those deciding what merit is tend to be of the same caste of rich and powerful elites as have always been in place. Does anyone seriously think that they would define “merit” in any way other than one that would protect their own children and promote their own power? For the meritocracy to work as its supporters claim, “merit” must be broadly and democratically defined; it must be flexible enough to apply to any given individual's set of potential talents. Nowhere that I have been able to find has “meritocracy” been defined along these lines. In fact, the very vagueness of how it is defined speaks loudly about why meritocratic ideals have been able to so dominate socio-political debate. We'd all like to think that we have what it takes to make it. The meritocracy appeals to shared American ideals that hard work, self-improvement, and self-confidence will actually get you somewhere. But none of those things matter if the very parameters upon which someone is said to have merit are rigged to begin with. Your ability to survive as a single mom of color by working three jobs and managing complex familial and social relationships in order to make sure your kids stay alive are admirable, but they're not what the managerial class wants, which begins with the sort of good credit score and job stability and student internships that your single-mom of color existence most likely excludes. This is not an accident; it is one of the many ways exclusion is baked right into the system.

A good deal more damaging is the obvious fact (one nobody has bothered to point out), that the meritocracy is not democracy. Our most basic egalitarian principles are obviated by the notion that you should be judged socio-culturally by merit rather than by the simple virtue of citizenship. This does not mean that a company should hire just anybody for any position, of course, but meritocracy implies that those with merit ought to rule, and that is, quite simply, undemocratic. As much as I hate to say it, even idiots have the same rights as the rest of us, and they are also entitled to the same opportunities. The structure of our schools and terms of employment assure that this is not the case; in fact, some complete idiots are promoted by the idea of the meritocracy because they display those aforementioned presupposed talents, ones that may or may not actually be damaging to the companies, stock portfolios, or congressional subcommittees these idiots control.

But most damning is that the meritocracy is morally bankrupt.

With all due respect to Dr. King, his own Christianity does not say that we should judge others “by the content of their character.” It says, rather, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” In fact, no major religious or moral system worth its salt says that we ought to treat people any better for having “merit” or any worse for not having it. Meritocratic ideals still perpetuate the notion that we need some system of ranking people, that what most aggrieves society is, somehow, the lack of a proper way to separate out the winners from everybody else. Indeed, the prime promoters of this idea are a class of people far more obnoxious than sore losers: sore winners. These are people who assume (with some degree of circularity) that whatever got them where they are is how merit is defined (see above), and they suffer immensely from accusations that they should in any way be beholden to those who happen to sully an otherwise happy species by not having the same characteristics they have. This is true even if those characteristics (and, again, Wall Street bankers come to mind) are downright dangerous to society as a whole. And yet, aren't those who lack these characteristics, in fact, most in need of our help? Won't those who possess “merit” do fine even without a system in place that rewards them for it, as, apparently, “merit” is the key to success anyway?

Compounding the moral emptiness at the heart of the meritocracy is the idea that competition is the means by which merit shows itself. As individuals compete for a place in society, for jobs, for respect and power, their talents will naturally sort them out. But even if we could assume that these competitions aren't rigged, we are faced with a problem: what do we, as a meritocratic society, do with all the losers? Is the teleological implication of a meritocracy that the losers ought to just, what, starve and die? In a meritocratic utopia are those without merit merely exiled, or are they actively killed? What happens to them? This promoters of the meritocracy seldom articulate. It's found only at the libertarian extremes, where the prospect of a bunch of people who don't have what it takes dying in the streets aligns with their social-Darwinist sense of justice.

But for those of us who purport to be guided by less draconian systems, this eventuality is abhorrent, to say the least. Our moral systems teach us exactly the opposite: rather than dismissing these people, the proper role of the “winners” is to use their superior powers—their status, their money, their talent—to help the losers out. If our system is based entirely—or even mostly—on competition, we've gone a long way toward recreating a Hobbesian “state of nature” of all-against-all within our society. And if that's what we want to do, then, well, why have a society at all? The whole point of cultural systems is to increase the odds its members will survive, not to recreate and reinforce ranking schemes along artificial and often arbitrary lines, and still less to do away with a whole class of people who don't “measure up” to the benchmarks those rankings set.

So what am I proposing? How about, instead of assuming that those with “merit” will win and those without will lose, we go about actually trying to create merit by leveraging the talents and abilities of individuals in order to meet social and market-based needs? How about, instead of a culture of competition that drives people out of what they can't do, we develop a culture of support that pro-actively helps people find out what they can do? How about, instead of looking for new ways to rank people, we look for new ways to understand people and their needs? How about, instead of judging worth on a person's “merit,” we assume a person's worth through the values of dignity and shared humanity?

All indications are that the future will be hard. Between climate change and market instability, between the flagging power of the US on the world stage and the dwindling of the planet's resources, we will need to develop ways of living that bring us closer together, that call on the hidden talents and the unfulfilled capacities of all of us. For the future to be a bright one, we will have to abandon “merit” and embrace mutuality, do away with systems of exclusion and create systems of radical inclusion. Together, even with our flaws, we live. Alone, even with our merits, we die.

Calling Out the Evil

by TS DeHaviland


Occasionally, commentators like me get raked over the proverbial coals for calling certain economists and corporate management types "evil."

But then you hear a story like the one Yuki Noguchi did for NPR last week. Noguchi, to her credit, pointed out that Robert Simons, of Harvard Business School, the vocal proponent of stacked ranking systems interviewed for this story, has tenure and is therefore not subject to the system. But nobody else in the story seemed to even blink when terms like these were used in reference to struggling employees:


"You have surgery to cut the cancer out."

 "[I]it can sometimes work with an ailing business that has gotten too fat."

"[T]he bottom performers."


We're really talking about people here, of course, and struggling people to boot. We're not talking about pathologies or cellulite or even the "bottom performers," but people whose "performance" in any given position is a complex matter of what's going on their lives, what kind of relationship they have with their co-workers, and even what kind of work they're doing.

To glibly refer to people in this way simply means that the experts are being evil, callously distanced from the humanity of people who work. Calling someone a "cancer" simply because that person might have coworkers that don't like her or might be a poor fit for a position or might be expected to do impossible things on impossible deadlines with little or no support is simply unconscionable.  

"Bottom performers" may, in fact, be the true innovators, but what they're doing may be beyond the ability of an organization, its managers, or the person's coworkers to understand.

And anyway, stacked ranking systems ask for fundamentally contradictory things: that people compete with one another but also act for the good of the team they work with and the organization as a whole. What part of the stupid-but-true cliche "There is no 'I' in 'team'" have proponents of stacked ranking not heard?

It gets much worse, of course: systems such as stacked ranking create cadres of people who gang up against the one or two scapegoats that they know they'll have to get rid of every year. This doesn't improve anything at all; it just poisons the atmosphere of work for everybody. After all, next year, the "poor performer" the popular kids decide to yank could be you.

The flippant attitude of those who purport to know about management is so deeply ingrained that the so-called proponent of employee engagement who is quoted here dismisses it even as she tries to explain it: "Employees like to hear that their opinion matters. They like to hear that their manager cares what they think."

Employees like to hear it, but if their opinions really don't matter and if the manager doesn't actually care what they think, if their opinions are never acted upon, then "engagement," like "empowerment" of the 1990s, will be just another empty business buzzword, just another mask for the deep-seated evil that all too often governs the terms of employment.     

Against Problem Solving and Goals

by Lael Ewy

Almost all of our self-help and management literature is infected with the co-occurring disorders of goal-setting and problem-solving. The problem I have with goals is that they're poor ways to live your life. We live a continuum, not from discrete moment to discrete moment.

Goals are preferred by power structures because they can be easily quantified, listed on a resume or in a quarterly report. But they're also defined by their completion, by the discrete nature of their own parameters. Once reached, they have an effect similar to certain drugs: momentary euphoria followed by a crash (another reason, no doubt, that those power structures prefer them). If the meaning of what you do is entirely goal-defined, you'll be at a loss about what to do and how to be after the goal is achieved. And if the goal is not achieved, you may be in danger of not knowing what the point of all your work in fact is.

Goals, then, while useful for marking work and organizing it, can also become traps, catching people in such a way that they define themselves in terms of what is or can be achievable or accomplished instead of as persons who are having experiences, learning, becoming.

Likewise, we fall into traps when we problem-solve. Almost all problem-solving techniques begin with defining the problem clearly; some even advocate defining the problem in a way that can be solved. This presupposes a certain kind of solution: one already implied in the way a problem presents.

This approach restricts the possible solutions and outcomes. It also often leads us to define problems in ways we're comfortable with instead of ways that address difficult truths. The “problem” of education in America, for example, is presented as a problem of achieving certain measurable outcomes, namely, student performance on standardized tests. This fails not only to address issues such as preparing students to apply what they know in the real world; it also fails to address the person as a learner, as someone who will have to keep on learning in an unpredictable (and unstructured) future environment.

Furthermore, we know that in the real world, problems are seldom defined in the abstract, prior to their being tackled. It's much more likely that real-world problems will be defined and redefined as they are being solved. Once we've (pre)defined what a problem is, brainstormed solutions, and selected a plan of action, there's little room for changing course. This is how we tend to get literally lost, how economies fail, how people get mired in “stuck” places. The problem has been so clearly defined from the outset that even firsthand observers sometimes fail to see what the problem really is.

We all know from experience, as well, that a structured problem-solving process, as good as it looks on paper and as easy as it is to teach, is seldom how problems actually get solved. Ideas often come to you while you're doing something other than actively thinking about them. But employers would probably not pay employees to creatively go do something else until a solution appears, as that's, also, nearly impossible to account for. So we continue to pretend our problem-solving techniques are the way things really work, content to have defined the actuality, safely, away.

Beyond Excellence

by Lael Ewy

We need to teach students not to meet benchmarks but to question the very premises upon which those benchmarks are based.

What is or isn't “excellent” is the wrong aim of education in a democracy. We should be able to create standards and critique them, not just to live up the standards those-who-would-have-us-think-they-are-our-betters set. We should be well-versed in making meaning, not just in coming up with answers.

All this dilly-dallying about with “performance” is actually selling education far short, and we, as a nation, should be ashamed of settling for it. Performance standards are, at best, a distraction from the potentials of education and, at worst, part of a concerted effort to reign in the more independent-minded, and therefore more subversive and revolutionary, aspects of being an educated person.

The fact that school systems find it difficult to meet (often arbitrary) performance criteria is not a measure of the “rigor” of those measures but rather an indication of their irrelevance. We are a culture full of people who find themselves falling behind economically, losing collective power, and constantly facing new struggles that our existing power structure, instead of helping us solve, helps to compound. None of these more salient problems are addressed by standardized tests, and we feel it, even if we haven't the language to express it.

One's self-discipline is a factor of one's motivation; it isn't “laziness” to not want to play a game that you know is rigged against you. Rather, it is common sense to opt out, screw off, half-ass it. It's a good deal more compelling when what you need to know is presented as a factor of what you need to do. Exploring ways to better yourself that you can see and touch makes much more sense than granulated, preprocessed abstractions and idealizations of “knowledge.” Paulo Friere understood this, and his “problem-posing” education was thus attacked as being “theoretical,” the antithesis of what it actually is.

All we've done with “excellence” is increase the minimum allowable balance of our current “banking” style of education; we've done nothing to put that value to work for a people increasingly impoverished in both real and intellectual ways.

Crisis Fatigue and the Indifference of Ted Cruz

By TS DeHaviland

I am suffering from a great deal of crisis fatigue. I could get all uppity, as I'm wont to do, and remind everyone that crises are mostly the results of poor planning, but the ugly truth is that most crises are problems that we create for ourselves for the sake of proving to others that our concerns are real. We feel the need to continually prove this because the world is largely indifferent to our actual complaints.

And while a few of us still give lip-service to compassion—and some of us are even authentic about it—there's nothing cooler to your average American than simply not giving a fuck.

Th real reason Ted Cruz's stand against Obamacare didn't really hurt him or the Tea Party in the long run is that it established his image of cold indifference. It was petty and selfish and procedurally pointless, but to a lot of Americans, it made him look like a badass. His faux filibuster was a declaration of “I so thoroughly don't give a shit about anyone else's suffering that I will shut down the whole government to get what I want.”

And if that sounds like assholery, it precisely well is.

But the fact that it made Ted Cruz, for one horrible historical moment, the most powerful man on Earth is not lost on any American male, and a whole lot of American males admire him for it.

You see, the same American males are all too aware that their power is in decline. But instead of looking around and blaming the Ted Cruzes in their own lives—their bosses, mainly—for it, they look at those people and ask “If they've got all the power and all the cash, how can I be like them and get some of that power and money too?”

The litany of ways they try to do it is also a laundry list of liberal complaints against conservatives: bigger guns and more of them; control over women's bodies; indifference to the downtrodden and the poor (even though many of them are poor themselves); alignment with a vengeful, Old Testament God.

What fatigues people like me, people who have been raised to take care of things and not wantonly break them, people who spend time solving problems instead of blaming others, is that the more Ted Cruzes we have blasting their indifference all over the walls of our schools and the halls of our Congress, the more energy people like me have to waste cleaning up tragic and unnecessary messes.

Towards a Dialectics of Organizational Tongues

by Lael Ewy

A lot of the trouble we end up having in the workplace stems from our preconceived notions of how the workplace ought to run, our expectations of what we ought to be getting out of it, and what different communications at the workplace signify.

The ability to adapt to a new work environment—to a new workplace culture—is essential to our survival and comfort on the job. This could be said about any organization, schools, even families as well.

Part of that success is in reading the contextual cues of the environment and the organizational culture, of the communications of the “natives.”

A couple of tools spring to mind to help deal with the problem of not adapting well to an organizational culture, and one prominently: Reader Response, a theory of literary critique. Reader Response postulates, among other things, that texts contain the means of their own interpretation, that each work gives the reader cues and clues as to what's going on within it. Often, readers are unaware of how a text is “teaching” you to read it, but exploring these indicators formally helps us to see what we might have missed, explain things that confuse us, and help us gain insight into the internal codes the author has used. An organization's culture can be analyzed in much the same way: an awareness of its “tells” can give us insights into what is really going on.

If done well, a person can can not merely adapt to an organization but also gain a certain amount of agency, if not power, within it. This can help address the unspoken power differences that often create barriers between organizational equals.

The in-group language of those in charge, however, can still be used to to create and maintain hierarchies and reinforce institutional structures of power. In the same way that a ruling social class has its own set of terms and cultural cues, so too do the powerful within an organization: methods of dress and address, jargon specific to a certain theory of or school of management, or idiomatic fixations become, very quickly, the means to express in order to impress. Mastery over these may not guarantee success at an organization, but they no doubt increase or improve it. In turn, lack of mastery of these is used to create and reinforce subservience. As Bakhtin might have put it, those at the top speak the language of organizational epic. A way to push back against this reification of power would be through some form of polyglossia, of the novelization of intraorganizational discourse.

As with other forms of colonization, when those in charge try to “improve” the staff by teaching them the “master's” tongue, the result is nearly inevitable failure: outside the context of the boardroom, the language of the power structure holds little relevance and therefore little power to create positive change. Its lack of effective magic in these circumstances reinforces the idea in the minds of the managers that those lower on the org chart deserve their place, that those already in charge are fit to lead; their mastery of the magic tongue makes it so. This also reinforces among those lower in the organization that they deserve their place: if only they could make the incantations work, all would be well. That they cannot simply proves that they are not fit to lead.

Both sides forget a few important things: those of lower organizational status forget that the language of the managers is ill-suited to the work that they are doing, the appropriate language being that created by the nature of the work itself. And the managers forget that the miraculous effects of their words—the ability to create almost instant compliance, for example—comes not from the words but from the fact of organizational power.

Thus the language of power is really about the organization and its structure, not about the work the organization ostensibly exists to do.

For power to be challenged, then, and for the good not necessarily of the organization but its stated aims, actual dialog must take place, without assumption and on neutral ground.

True empowerment is dialogic, a product of shared magic.

A Bit on Brands

by EW Wilder

Brands have long lives but thin skins.

Branding is an essentially defensive move, as shown by its origins in tracking the ownership of cattle. The brand attempts to avoid attack by approximating ubiquity. For as much as the factual history of a brand may be written, it projects ahistoricity; the brand's job is to convince you that it has always existed. In this way, branding is much like religious iconography and tries to perform the same function.

Frequently, it succeeds.