Materialist Meritocracy

Who can object to merit? Merit, by definition, means somehow 'earning' what you have. The most basic definition of merit is "possession + justice." Since we all like having things, and justice is always good, why object to merit? If we don't object to merit in the abstract, why should we object to a meritocracy, or, 'rule by merit?' Would we prefer incompetent people who don't deserve their posts?

The English language is very slippery and it is hard to separate a word's denotation and its connotations. Though the denotation of meritocracy may well be a good society, the connotation as it has been used by its proponents has always been an evil dystopia. The people who most push for a meritocracy are libertarians who would permit practically anything in the name of profit, and spare no mercy whatsoever for people who don't make a profit. It is in this sense I oppose the word 'meritocracy.' Or rather, I oppose the adherents of 'materialist meritocracies.'

In the olden days, people looked down on money-chasers and rich merchants, bankers, and performers as a sort of rabble. They were not dignified and they were not noble. They had no merit and therefore meritocracy meant keeping money as far away from power as possible. Depending on what is considered meretricious in a society, a meritocracy has completely different meanings.

Here is a simple example. Is it really true that the poor monk, George Mendel, who discovered the laws of genetics and how life both reproduces and evolves while gardening in his monastery, is really inferior to an NBA basketball player whose sole claim to fame is being tall and jumping high enough to push a ball through an elevated hoop? And yet according to libertarians, objectivists, and materialist meritocrats, they would have to support the rich basketball player as being superior to the poor monk. The law of the market is final. Money is the best and only indicator of your service to mankind. All good is quantifiable and wealth is the final sum of your contribution to the world, and your virtue as a person.

As for poets who died coughing up blood in small boarding houses, or philosophers who died barefoot, penniless, or insane, or soldiers who died on campaign living in tents and wearing drab old clothes, to hell with them. As for priests who took on vows of poverty so that they could concentrate on intellectual pursuits over material ones, off with their heads. The only good people are those who can make money. The only virtues on earth are the ones that can help people make more money -- intelligence, hard work, perseverance, ambition, normalcy, salesmanship. A person is generally praised in a materialist meritocracy who can smooth talk his way out of anything while working 60 hours a week in a horrible job that only slowly starts to make money after decades of deeply indebted effort. It does not matter whether this job can point to any objective good it is doing in the world, a lawyer is as good as an inventor, a doctor is as good as a writer, an athlete is as good as an astronaut. The only question is the bottom line, not how they got there, or why they tried.

In this system of meritocracy, marriage is seen as a prudent way to save money on living expenses and a good investment in a loyal psychotherapist/secretary. Children are a hindrance but if you simply must have them, it is best to keep it down to one or two, and it is intolerable to take any time off work to raise them. There is actually no benefit in consumption, it is treated the exact same as waste. Materialist meritocrats have no interest in the consumer products money can buy. They are far too purist for that. To them, money is its own reward. Money is the only way to keep score on who deserves self-satisfaction, pride, and the honor and praise of his peers. Life is a competition and the point is to end up with more points, in the form of larger lifetime earnings, than your opponents. On that last day you can tell the rest of the world, "Eat it, sucks to be you, losers!" As they lower you into the ground. It does not matter if you lived in a shack the whole time you accumulated this wealth. It doesn't matter if the government confiscates it all after you die (though it is terrible if they confiscate it while you're alive, because it deviates the fair scoring system and thus 'rigs the game' away from merit.) Since the purpose of money is to keep a fair, objective scoring system of people's innate worth, 'wasting' it on showy consumer items like cars, fashion, and jewelry is actually seen as gauche, as 'prole.' The real purpose of money is to convert it into an electronic number somewhere in the ether, where you can check it every month and see if it has grown or shrunk. The secret to happiness is seeing it grow every month into a higher number than your friends, family, neighbors or coworkers have in their digital ether.

In contrast to these materialist virtues, hard work, normalcy, perseverance, etc, there are people who operate via a completely contrasting code of virtue. By having different definitions of 'the Good,' and 'value,' they emphasize different personality traits that are better able to achieve these differing values. Virtue can mean any number of different things to different people. People with inherently different personalities and desires can both claim that they are the ones with 'true merit.' Courage, Wisdom, Piety, and Temperance were the virtues of the Platonic era. A militaristic culture might consider courage, ruthlessness, loyalty, and honor to be their highest goods. A happy society might consider cheerfulness, hope, gratitude, and kindness to be the highest virtues. Muslims would probably value submission, learnedness, and humility to be the highest goods. Christians might call for faith, hope, and charity. Hedonists might call for people who can hold their liquor, are sexually adept, open-minded, tolerant, or thrill-seeking. There can be no universal morality because that would require people to all want the same things.

As for me, I value Truth, Beauty, and Love. I consider all other virtues and achievements as worthless dross in comparison. The people who most possess these traits, or the virtues that help arrive at them, are the people with the highest levels of merit. The most points. By virtue of their merit, they earn for themselves whatever tools are necessary to continue producing these goods. Therefore, simply by being a virtuous individual, simply by feeling good things, they earn whatever amount of wealth is necessary to continue leading a good life.

In this scenario a meritocracy would mean 'rule of the noble of spirit.' These people would be able to take people's money regardless if they had earned it via 'hard work', or 'perseverance'. Instead, they earned it through discovering and telling the Truth, creating or applauding great works of Beauty, and loving and treating kindly, and as a sort of guardian class, their people, their family, their culture, and their environment. The nobility of spirit has much in common with the nobility of the ancient aristocracies, who were commonly leaders in scientific discovery, philosophy, artists or patrons of the arts, soldiers or generals who defended their people at great sacrifice to themselves, or priests who continuously toiled to educate and elevate the spirits of the weak and easily tempted from the path of dissolution and degeneracy. At its best, Europe's aristocracy far surpassed the democratic governance around the world today, or the CEO's of the world's richest companies. However, the aristocracy back then relied on back-breakingly poor peasant labor, overly gaudy consumption, and blood ties that often had no relation to personal worth. Today, the nobility would all have to pass qualification tests without relying on connections to anyone else, and their income would be a small burden on the working class -- after all, in a world that doesn't consider wealth to be important, those of the highest class could easily be dirt poor.

Furthermore, just as anyone in a materialist meritocracy deserves the money they make, through whatever quantities, however small, of their virtues of intelligence, hard work, perseverance, etc, that helped them make the money. In a meritocracy of love, beauty, and truth, anyone deserves the money they didn't make, through whatever quantities, however small, of their virtues of intelligence, honor, courage, sensitivity, empathy, etc that make them valuable people. A materialist meritocrat would say this is ridiculous, the virtues I'm describing don't result in any bread or houses, therefore where will the money come from? However, when looked at carefully, 99% of money isn't made by humans at all -- rather, it is the gift of plants, animals, and machines who do all the work for us. Humans just expropriate other people's labor. The highest up in the human food chain are those who get rich off the labor of other humans, never doing anything to make food or housing themselves. Since even a materialist meritocrat is fine with expropriating 99% of wealth produced by others by virtue of their being 'human' as opposed to a plant, animal, or machine, they inherently must understand the logic that wealth belongs to people due to their innate virtue, not due to whatever efforts they took to produce said wealth.

It's true that we can't all have food and houses simply by leading good lives -- not until the workforce is fully automated. ((In a potential future, we could even lead two lives, a subconscious mind that does all material labor just as we instinctively pump our hearts and breathe, and a conscious mind that lives off the fruit of this labor they didn't 'produce' and had no hand in creating, while only pursuing truth, beauty, and love as a 100% occupation.)) But so much of our wealth is created automatically that a minimum standard of living can be secured for everyone whether they work or not. Voluntary work for the sake of people who are A) bored, or B) want more money so they can buy nicer things and higher prestige -- would easily cover the costs of a moral system that didn't directly connect merit (just possession) to wealth creation.

Looked at from another perspective, it's already been established that 80% of Americans only produce 15% of our wealth, and therefore we could cease employing 80% of Americans at only the expense of a 15% reduction in our average standard of living. Since Americans earn $45,000 per capita, and a minimum standard of living can easily be met by $10,000 per capita, we could afford a 15% reduction in wealth creation for the sake of freeing 80% of mankind from a life of drudgery. If that sounds crazy, the rejection of this logic implicitly acknowledges that the wealth disparity in this country is completely unfair and unmerited, and that in fact the poor really do create the vast majority of wealth, even though they don't possess any of it. In which case substituting the 'unfairness' of a citizen's dividend for the 'unfairness' of capitalist exploitation should be a moral wash.

The benefits of a moral meritocracy are far better than the benefits of a materialist meritocracy. A perfect materialist meritocracy would involve everyone working as hard as possible, living as well adjusted a life as possible, being as educated as possible, having the best possible public relations with others, etc. They would cut all 'unnecessary' expenses like children and they would never actually spend their money, they would just invest it and reinvest it into ever more profitable industries. Their theoretical wealth would be massive but their actual wealth would be puny -- just as puny as people who didn't care about wealth at all and never bothered to make any money. A moral meritocracy, however, would be one continuous gift to the public, to the people, to the consumer. For instance, all information content would be freely available over broadband internet, without piracy restrictions or fees. People would make art for the simple joy of it, and would compete continuously with each other to acquire more fans and make more people happy with their works. With society's elite geared towards making science and art, instead of money, the video games, books, music, and television we consumed would all be of a higher level of quality.

People's education in schools would no longer be about practical matters that help make money in the future, but a smorgasbord of the greatest art and scientific theories humanity has ever produced, taught to students so that they can bask in the sheer enjoyment of contemplation. They would read Shakespeare, and Plutarch, and Gibbon, and Plato. They would learn to play instruments and participate in all the greatest symphonies of our past composers. They would study math and physics just to see the beautiful symmetry and order behind the cosmos, and history just to discover the cast of characters humanity has produced, its heroes and villains, a study of just how high the human spirit or human society has reached, and what we can do to be more like them. ((Plutarch's Lives is a good type of this sort of history, as is Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.)) Imagine twenty years of being instructed in how best to enjoy the art and science around you, then being released into the world to marry and have a family, so you can teach the same joys to your children. So you can share your favorite books, favorite music, favorite discoveries, and favorite philosophy, with people who previously didn't even exist and never have had a chance to experience any of it before. What incredible good you are creating, what a fountain of blessings you are to your children and the universe, which is just cold dead nothingness without you! And this from the people who aren't smart or creative enough to contribute something new from their own hearts.

As to people like the 07 Company, who in Japan had the most rudimentary of budgets and released a tiny game as some sort of three man startup, which turned into the Higurashi no naku koro ni Anime, what is there to say? They produced, with almost no material costs, a work of art almost unparalleled on Earth. The same can be said of the company who produced Nanoha, who had so little funding that they knew their first serious try at an anime series would also be their last if it didn't become popular. Who as a working thesis, decided that a great anime meant combining all the normal, likable, and popular elements of the animes they'd seen before, but still ended up with a story completely different and above the average through their unique insight into the essential goodness of both their heroes and their villains.

Or how about the makers of Final Fantasy, who on a shoestring composed a few songs on a MIDI sound card and had the animation level of characters in boxes waving their sword/cane back and forth and hitting another creature in another box far away, through apparently telekinesis, turning into one of the most popular and beloved franchises of all time?

These people proved the complete separation between wealth and value in their own work. For an insignificant production price, they gave humanity such wonderful goods. They are the true 'producers,' the true 'productive class.' The joy that comes from helping so many other people feel some of the most life changing and life justifying feelings in their lives is worth more than anything money can buy.

Additionally, people whose highest value is making money are inevitably cowards. They crave security like an addict. They will make any compromises, avoid any confrontation, admit to any crimes, just so long as they can continue making money in peace. This is a soul-deadening way of life, whose ultimate expression is the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, after all, was founded on the idea that materialism was the source of human happiness and that things like Truth, Beauty, and Love should all be suppressed as hindrances to the State's ability to make more money. Ninety years later, when communism was overthrown, people finally began to take joy in their ability to say what was in their hearts, to go to church and light candles, to do frivolous things and wear frivolous colors. A materialist meritocracy is better at making money, but it is just as totalitarian an opponent of truth, beauty, and love as Communism was. If it is not useful, it is not beautiful. Therefore all buildings should just be naked glass and concrete towers. If it creates insecurity, it is not true. Therefore race differences don't exist. And if it subsidizes losers or failures, compassion, sympathy, or any love for your fellow man is a sin. Therefore the poor must be left to die in the streets where they belong. People, in order to get promotions and get hired, toe the politically correct line and bury what they know in their hearts to be true. In a moral meritocracy, people would tell the truth and damn the financial consequences. Damn the civil wars that ensued, if that's what it took. At no price, whatsoever, would they be stopped from telling the truth as they saw it, and shattering any sacred elephant that stood in their path.

Fear is the mind killer. A moral meritocracy has no fear because its goods are ethereal -- they are a state of mind -- they can be achieved while in chains, while penniless, while shunned, while punished in any way. A materialist meritocracy can easily intimidate and control everyone, however, because everyone's 'worth' is reachable at a click of a button, and the terror this inspires makes mice out of men. A world that values men of high spirits creates high spirited men. They are simply more alive, more human, than the sheeple who mill about mouthing the same old platitudes, the same mindless lies, the same tired slogans, of a materialist meritocracy. One of the ways communists punished dissent was denying the children of dissenters access to college educations. In a materialist meritocracy, it is easy to control people by denying dissidents opportunities to create wealth. In a world where everyone has wealth as a default, no one can be bullied or intimidated into preserving a fundamentally rotten state. Freedom of speech cannot just mean not being locked up for what you say. It also must mean having enough financial independence that what you say has no consequence on your ability to support yourself or your family. A moral meritocracy creates more genuine freedom than a libertarian's materialist meritocracy, where people must continuously watch their backs and endeavor to 'fit in' and 'not make waves' that 'might upset someone.'

So fine, let's return to a meritocracy. I have no objection to rule by merit, or assigning just possession of things based on those who have earned it through their virtue. But who says money is the best indicator of value, or that making money is the most virtuous activity in life? When was that decided? It certainly wasn't true in the past. I see no reason for it to continue being true in the future. We can do better than that.