Where to even begin with meritocracies? The problems that meritocracy has created in America alone are nearly boundless—ranging from the straightforward repercussions of high-pressure environments for everybody, to intense shaming for both the winners and losers, all while we continue to put faith in the system responsible for these problems.
It all starts with the way meritocracy structures profit and capital. In a meritocracy, the main form of capital is ourselves, and maximizing gains means extracting more profit from ourselves than others. This profit is measured through our ability to cultivate and use our skills, as well as learning new ones, better than everybody else. Someone will always be working harder, smarter, and longer, creating an endless demand for workers to do more. Then, it puts all of the pressure to succeed on one’s merit, entirely removing luck and circumstance, instead encouraging burnout over prioritizing well-being, causing us to blame our failures entirely on ourselves. In this kind of system, a negative feedback loop forms where every improvement in productivity and effort makes everyone else need to make the same improvement, only now everyone is on the same level again, and another big improvement is needed.
This negative feedback loop was cleverly explained by an analogy from a conversation between two film characters from China, whose education and work cultures are extremely meritocratic. Imagine a full theater is watching a film, and one person in the front row stands up to get a better view. As they block the people behind them, everybody begins to stand up so much that even the ones whose views aren’t blocked will still stand up anyway. In the end, a full theater of people are standing up for no reason. The way meritocracy emphasizes and creates this constant shifting of “the best” creates an intense pressure to push oneself even further, not towards a goal, but in the hope of outpacing the rising bar. When seeing meritocracies in this way, it’s easier to understand that one hundred-hour work weeks are not a step along the way towards a more productive and perfect world, but rather the result of a negative loop where working hard only guarantees the opportunity to work even harder in a few years.
Then, even after thriving and beating this abusive system, those who win lose their humility. Giving all the credit to the winners’ merit places self-importance, leaving no room for luck, chance, or even gratitude for the people who certainly helped you along the way. This lack of humility is a broad-reaching concept, mostly serving as the most intense pressure of all. When humility is lost, it turns all guilty feelings into shame.
Guilt is a momentary emotion, centered around specific actions, while shame is centered around the person itself. While guilt is a necessary emotion that drives social interaction, shame is one that dictates and messes up the whole being. Humility allows guilt to exist because it detaches specific actions from the person by acknowledging that the self is not the center of events or the world; lack of humility does the opposite, confirming that the self is the most important, that actions represent the self, making equivalent our actions and ourselves. Rather than place guilt on individual failures, mistakes or lacking effort, meritocracies place greater importance on the overall inability of the person as a whole to have succumbed to the negative feedback loop described a few paragraphs ago. In this way, the winners of meritocracy run forever on their treadmills, all to shame at bay—rather than live for the best, we live to not be the worst.
Meanwhile, the losers of meritocracies are full of shame and unable to even keep it away through work. According to the Hamilton Project, the bottom quintile of people by income work an average of thirty hours a week, and have the highest rates of work hour instability. They can work anywhere from ten hours a week to forty hours, and sixty-one percent of low-income workers want more work hours. Those sixty-one percent of underworked people aren’t lazy. They want to work, they want to find the dignity of labor and yet are not given it. But meritocracies dictate that these people were mostly or partly responsible for their circumstances, further shaming them and making it even harder to rise.
These harms aren’t visible to most people, who are more than happy to believe that by working hard, they can succeed. This is a deeply comforting view, especially in a world rife with inequalities and factors beyond our control. At IHS, 49.4 percent of respondents to a survey agree with the statement “most people can succeed if they are willing to work hard,” and fifty percent think that success in life is partly determined by factors outside of our control while 29.5 percent think it is sometimes determined by factors outside of our control. These statistics show a general trend towards faith in meritocracy. Still, these statistics are not as polarizing as it seems—17.9 percent think success in life is mostly determined by factors outside of our control. When given the prompt: “Agree or disagree with the statement: ‘most people can succeed if they are willing to work hard,’” 44.2 percent answered “a bit of both.” Keep in mind IHS is a progressive school which educates its students well of the many inequalities of our world that prevent the ideal meritocracy that we all envision from becoming an actually successful utopia. As such, most of its students are well-aware that success is not always determined by ourselves. However, the fact that the statistics still skew in favor of meritocracy reflects our continued faith in it despite the ways it has harmed us.
All of this loops back to the very first paragraph, which relates to the dramatic increase in overworking ourselves, even from secondary education. The combined forces of a negative feedback loop, intense shame culture, and a continued faith in meritocracy are more than enough to trap us in our shame, and crush the people who could not win.
By this time you may be seething. You may be wondering if there is a better system than meritocracy anyway, and I’m here to suggest that there isn’t. No system is ever ideal, and the struggle of fitting ourselves into a flawed world is central to being human. But some systems are much more flawed than others, modern meritocracy being one of those. By learning to be humble, we can thrive in a meritocracy without sacrificing ourselves. In the first analogy of the movie theater, the second film character replies by saying, “no one dares to sit down again.” But they are not saying to leave the theater itself, which is the assumption we like to jump to, but rather to enjoy the movie more comfortably. It’s not necessary to completely renounce meritocracy by disavowing education and expertise, but it is necessary to leave the abusive feedback loops and shame cultures and stop degrading the “losers.” Learning humility reduces or completely takes away shame, allowing us to make mistakes and take full, guilty, accountability for them, as well as reducing credentialism and giving freedom to pursue passion rather than pride. This can help end the negative feedback loop by reducing the need for such exponential improvement. Without shame, there is less incentive to prove oneself as having more merit, and across a whole system of people, it slows to a grind the cycle built on constantly not being enough. And finally, being humble stops looking down on others. Lessening our self-importance leaves room for the importance of others, such as recognizing there is so much merit and worth in less educated, unemployed, or generally less fortunate people.
You might also think that being humble means you can’t be confident. This is a misconception; being humble means you can’t be arrogant. Having humility is lessening the importance of the self, while confidence is increasing belief in one’s attributes, mutually helpful traits. In fact, it is difficult to be confident without humility, and it is impossible to be shameful and humble. Shame arises from the same places of self-importance of arrogance, which meritocracy tout as “success mindset” or “confidence.” By learning to be humble, one can leave the circle of shame and false pride, yet still have confidence and succeed in their goals. It is high time to reconsider the merits of meritocracy. It could be the greatest addiction of our day, but instead of chasing the glitzy glam of winning, we try to out pace our shame.
What meritocracy?