Meritocracy is a Trap

In 1958, a British sociologist named Michael Young wrote a book called The Rise of Meritocracy.

He invented the word, and before Young, it did not really exist, and he did not invent it as a compliment.

The book is a satire written as a history from the year 2034, looking back at a Britain that had recognized itself or reorganized itself entirely around intelligence and effort.

Jung called this quality merit and he built in fiction the society that would result from selecting people by it and nothing else.

He did not write a utopia.

He wrote a warning in his telling.

The people selected as meritorious hardened into a class that no longer had to justify its position because the position had already been declared earned.

Young's own sentence for this is the one that survives him.

And I think it goes something like this.

Every selection of one is a rejection of many.

He meant that as an indictment.

In 2001, more than 40 years later, Young was still alive to watch his warning fail.

He wrote an essay for the Guardian asking Britain's political class to stop using his own word as praise he's watched tony blair's government adopt meritocracy as a governing ideal and he said so plainly that a society ruled by people who believed their position is earned becomes a society with no language left for the people underneath it because if the system is fair and you are at the bottom, then the only explanation left is that it is your fault.

And that is the first thing I want us to sit with today.

The word we have been using as a description of fairness was coined as a description of a trap.