Author doesn't seem to understand what a meritocracy is.
You can't get lost in a meritocracy. Your merit determines your rank.
What can happen is that you don't understand how the merit is computed. Or you can misjudge your own merit.
You can't get lost in a meritocracy. Your merit determines your rank.
What can happen is that you don't understand how the merit is computed. Or you can misjudge your own merit.
Different interests have different merit functions. Even given a merit function there are huge gaps in actually applying the function to get a measure of merit out of a person. And even if you have a group of people falling into a well ordered list of true merits, there's a lot of difficulty in actually translating that merit into success.
He was an outsider who became an insider, only to discover there was another elite (social, economic, political) level that he feared he'd never crack.
Eventually, he's bed-ridden with a cold, and for the first time, actually reads and gets lost in literary works (whereas academia had become a "scene" too focused on abstract literary criticism).