Meritocracy

Meritocracy, a society ruled by those possessing merit, is founded on the belief that merit is or should be the only measure of personal and social value. Meritocracy is a foundation belief of libertarians. The term first appeared in 1958, but the same notion was prevalent in the 19^th century when it was called social Darwinism. In the 21^st century it has again become a virulent doctrine heavily influencing every thing from economic policy to education.

There is much in our cultural history to suggest that merit has merit. If you look at the advances that human beings have made, especially in the last 400 years, they were discovered or initiated by a miniscule portion of the human beings that existed over that period. We, as a culture, express our belief that a person has a right to everything he or she creates or legally acquires, that is, he or she merits whatever they legally acquire. However, let us ask how merit functions as a social philosophy, which is what libertarians and their founder Ayn Rand intend.

Merit is one among a number of human virtues. One of the problems of any social philosophy founded on a human virtue is that the resulting society almost inevitably winds up as an authoritarian one, usually a dictatorship. Plato, for example, argued that knowledge was the primary human virtue. His proposed state, elucidated in his work entitled The Republic, eventuated in a monarchy ruled by a philosopher king. Merit, however, is but one among a number of human virtues such as empathy, generosity, etc. Additionally it can be found in some human beings combined with selfishness, a lust for power or incompetence in areas in which the meritorious person has no competence. In short merit, like many other human virtues, is a lousy criterion by which to allocate wealth and power. Yet merit along with a notion of unmitigated freedom is the rubric under which much of this nation's business and allocation of its resources are conducted. In these and other areas merit has replaced need and equality.

Let us now contrast what I shall call social virtues with these personal virtues. Among social virtues are equality, fairness and empathy. The libertarian and the massive political right wing condemn these virtues, often as socialism, as governing principles because, they say, they can lead to dictatorship. While this is true, it is also true of their free market capitalism, as witness Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Pinochet even had Milton Friedman, the father of free market capitalism, as an advisor. The point here is that any political economy can lead to dictatorship; hence, this criticism is irrelevant. The only way a democracy can avoid becoming a dictatorship is by constant citizen vigilance.

Among the insufficiencies of the libertarian view are the internal conflicts of an ethos predicated on notions as vague as "merit." Presumably, in the current libertarian view, the "merit" of Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers, Bill Gates, George Soros and take your pick of Wall Street financiers, say Timothy Geither, is that they all made a bundle of money far in excess of what they could personally need. I included George Soros , even though he supports liberal causes, because he made his millions gambling on the continuously changing values of the world's different currencies. On the basis of human need and well being this is one of the most deleterious uses of money, differing little from the Wall Street casino mentality that produced our current finance-generated recession. In 1921 Thorstein Veblen, one of the more gifted thinkers this country has produced, wrote a book titled The Engineers and the Price System. In this book Veblen explored the conflicts between what he called "business" and "industry." Business was solely interested in making money. Industry, in which he included workers, was interested in making things. Veblen pointed out that industry was often hampered in its efforts to make things, especially new things, by the profit concerns of business. A current example would be the Koch brothers fighting clean energy technology in order to protect their fossil fuel business. Libertarians have no way to choose between the merit of money making and the merit of production without going outside their sacred merit-based ethos to social values such as human welfare. Of course, what Veblen called industry in his day has been largely taken over by what he called the price system. Major industries became more interested in making money than making things. Hence through exporting our "making" capability to the cheap labor of China et. al., the major segment of our economy moved from manufacturing to finance.

Perhaps more basic to the failings of libertarianism is its destructiveness. Libertarianism, like ideologies in general, suffers from focusing on one human virtue to the exclusion of any others thereby creating the basis of an authoritarianism, which now characterizes our society, although it is generally disguised as the rule of money. When the Supreme Court deemed corporations to be persons with all the rights of a person, including supporting the political candidates of their choice, it was clear that we no longer had a democracy, we now have a plutocracy, which is the arbitrary rule of the many by the wealthy few. At a deeper level we are witnessing what happens, as it so often does, when personal virtues (the merit of making one's fortune) are made public virtues (this is the way society should be run.)

The bottom line in all this is that converting private virtues into public virtues leads almost inevitably to arbitrary government and is a dangerous and often unrecognized enemy of democracy. The individual values of freedom and merit are the two most prominent examples of what happens when individual values are made into public values. We need to understand what is happening when Murdoch and the Koch brothers and their Cato think tank push merit and freedom. In view of the propaganda we daily and voluminously face it is imperative that people understand that there is no virtue in wealth otherwise Donald Trump would be a paragon of virtue. It must be equally realized that excessive wealth is destructive of democracy and is a constant threat to the social fabric. We need to ask whose merit and whose freedom. We need, in short, to return to our social values and find expression for our private values within that social context lest our species perish from this earth.

Bob Newhard