A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you | Hacker News Reader

A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you

aeon.co

5 pointsuoaei10 comments

Disempowering woke propaganda much? Deceptive consolation prize for people to explain away their personal failures by incorrectly legitimizing a refusal of personal responsibility? “it’s not your fault, you’d be great too, except for luck. The only thing that separates you from those you envy it’s nothing about you it’s just luck.” Emphasizing envy, and hate rather inspiration? Encouraging the belittling of people's achievements by incorrectly and self-servingly falsely attributing them to luck rather than their choices? Compelling psychological fake payoff that drives addiction to the fake victim-zero responsibility delusion? Providing cover for the status quo hierarchy by concealing and confusing knowledge of how to ascend that hierarchy? “But it’s empowering to think this way.” Cynical redirection of emotional potential energy away from useful avenues, which may upset the hierarchy and transform your life, into useless, idempotent, cathartic outlets that ensure you do nothing but feel great in your righteous rage doing it? Better to have you angry and uselessly yelling at something you can’t control then believing maybe you can have control over it if only you fucking work at it?--and easy to sell that to a generation, who wants a quick fix with a compelling short-circuiting payoff that all the pain of your failure means nothing because it’s not your fault? Disempowering people by short circuiting away your ability to learn, build, create and strive? An emergent property of a system of control to preserve an unhealthy status quo or a cynical, deliberately created set of delusional narratives to keep people under control, sold to them on the promise of solving their pain and suffering, and feeling good? Convincing people you are empowering them, when actually you're just suppressing them? Yeah that’s something I bet a whole lotta people can get behind; it's a woke organized religion. Ugh… disgusting

That is a rather well constructed rant... agreeable in the substance behind the rhetorical questions. Especially in this anti-intellectual social-climate that is all-pervasive through and through all institutions of the west, and the infantile ideologies of that took hold of the western elites. (I single out west here purely for the contrast of where we come from intellectually/philosophically to where we are currently which to me is easy study case).

However, while we would agree, I wonder which "natural" processes are really to be understood to stand behind this decay. Of cause, it is not new, we can read already in Sumerian tablets, Greek and Roman then witness accounts of their empire's disintegration and how in fact people did clearly perceived the rotting (just as we do now).

In other words, identifying the symptoms (as implied in the question you posed), is one thing. To understand processes inherent in the system of systems itself is yet another level. And then, thought I do not think possible, one can postulate how to slow down, or even reverse such trend. (I would say natural trend in the phase of natural systems of societies).

Oh, it's not a rant. And I've been working on these ideas for a number of years. Each sentence is basically a restatement of the same idea (except I suppose the ones that posit a cause behind this). Thanks for engaging! I'll try to read your response more fully tomorrow maybe it is late here :) !! :P ;) xx ;p

If you read the article, you will find that this rant only appeases your pre-existing biases against certain worldviews, and does not actually refer to any of the article's content.

Certain worldviews? Sounds likes maybe there's "another side" and you side with that? Did I get you wrong? Impossible for you to explain more?

You seem confused. I fail to find anywhere in the article that claims that hard work is not useful, nor that outcomes are entirely out of anyone's control. Your argument pre-supposes assertions that are simply not present in the article.

I seem confused? Really? In my experience these things go hand in hand. When someone starts talking like that, they usually share all these other traits as well. Well let me take a look at it again, ok? And we can come back and talk about it if you want. Sounds like a bad idea? :) ;p xx ;p

The argument that nobody can take personal credit for any purported virtue or accomplishment is logically airtight, and was laid out much more entertainingly and in more detail by Mark Twain a long time ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Man%3F_(Twain_essay)

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/70/70-h/70-h.htm

I would not take it at face value; it's interesting to think about his motivations and how self-serving the thesis was. I just think it's more interesting than these "anti-meritocracy" articles.

Life gives you a lot of possibilities. The idea that if one can't be at the top of the hill then it's not worth working towards a goal is dangerous. Being the richest person on earth is not the only possible goal. It's very true that luck dictates where you will land in life. But it's bad, to think that hard work is useless. The best of situations is to meet luck and make sure you can take advantage of the situation by being prepared. Hard work will help you. Counting on only luck to get you through life is a bad plan.

An anti-belief in merit is not just wrong, it’s bad for the while society.

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