Pylimitics

Does Elon Musk deserve a trillion dollars? Did he earn it in any way? My answer would be no, and I think I’m not alone. But let’s ratchet the scale down a bit. How about Tim Cook, CEO of Apple? According to the most recent SEC filing (required of publicly-traded companies), he was paid $74 million for a year’s work. Does he deserve it? Did he earn it? Is it morally and ethically acceptable for him to be compensated at that level? He’s clearly a very, very good CEO. Apple is fantastically successful, and during his time as CEO the company’s success has grown. How much of that is because of him? And how did he get his job? Was it his talent, hard work, discipline, and dedication that brought him to the job he has? Did he deserve that?

The questions will continue to get more difficult until morale improves. Think about your doctor, if you have a person you put in that category. Doctors, while not usually receiving CEO-class compensation, tend to be in the upper-middle-class range in terms of compensation. Does your doctor deserve that material wealth? Becoming a medical doctor is not an easy thing; it takes talent and years of hard work, discipline, and dedication to establish a person in that job. 

Now think about the teachers who educate your children, if you have them, or children in general if you don’t. In the US, teachers typically do not receive a great deal of compensation. Certainly not in the upper-middle-class range. These days, not even in the middle-class range at all. Nevertheless, becoming a teacher is also not an easy thing. It also takes talent and years of hard work, discipline, and dedication to establish a person in that job. Do the teachers of your children deserve the compensation they receive? Is it morally and ethically acceptable for them to be compensated at that level?

It’s time to think about yourself. You may not have a job right now, but statistically speaking you probably do. Regardless of what your job is or has been, it probably took talent, hard work, dedication, and discipline to get that job and perform it. Let’s just grant, for the sake of argument, that everybody has talent in some areas, that everybody works hard at something, that every single person you know or ever met has been dedicated to something. People experience very different outcomes in life, in society. Do they deserve what they experience? Do they earn what they receive? Is it morally and ethically acceptable that our society is organized as it currently is? 

The official story, which we are propagandized from a very early age to accept, is that yes, it is morally and ethically correct that some people receive more, and other people receive less. Not just monetary compensation, either. Moral standing. Reputation. Idolization. Awestruck adoration. Mindless devotion. Why? Because of something innate in them. They were “born to lead.” They “worked harder” than anybody else. They “rose to the top.” They “scored higher” on all the tests. They put in “longer hours.” They had that indefinable “x factor.” We all know lots of these phrases, and most of us repeat them. We may not think very hard about them, but they’re in our minds and we turn to them automatically.

Years ago I worked for a company that suddenly, with no warning, collapsed. Dozens of people, including me were almost instantly unemployed. This was not a layoff; there was no final payment to ease our transition to a new job. The company ran out of money and that was it. I was incredibly lucky in the immediate aftermath because someone I knew well and had worked with previously had just opened a job that I was qualified to do. So I had a new job within the week. This was a very different experience from my ex-colleagues, some of whom lost their homes. I mentioned the event to someone I knew and explained that I had been very lucky. He responded that no, “you make your own luck.” 

I saw that as patently untrue, but I think my acquaintance really believed it. The idea that talent, hard work, discipline, and dedication are the key ingredients to success in society is very deeply embedded, and he was on board. If I remember correctly, he owned a small business of some sort. And I’m sure he would have (and does) describe himself as “self-made.” He might even have described me as “self-made.”

The story we are told from a young age is that there is such a thing as “merit,” and you amass “merit” through doing the right things. The right things include hard work, discipline, and dedication. There’s some acknowledgement of other factors like talent, but those are slightly atonal notes in the overall chord, because you can’t do anything about being born with one or another type of talent. Talent isn’t quite “merit.” But we’re also reminded that talent isn’t everything. It still takes, the story goes, hard work, discipline, and dedication to make the most of your talent. To turn your talent into another source of “merit.”

Another thing you can be born with or without is existing wealth, and you can’t do anything about that either. If you’re born into a family with a huge fortune, that’s another factor that doesn’t fit comfortably with “merit.” In fact this factor doesn’t have much of a connection at all to the moral we’re intended to take from the story, which is doing the right things to better ourselves — which is measured as “merit.” The atonality of this factor is often hand-waved away. Never mind those lucky folks; they pretty much exist in their own world anyway and don’t mix with the rest of us. 

The idea that merit is a real thing, and that we live in a society that is at least to some extent a meritocracy is a very old notion. Thousands of years old. And it must somehow mesh well with human tendencies in assumption and reasoning, because it’s very easy to believe and agree with. Once we’re primed, which happens very early for most people, the idea feels almost obvious. Of course some people “rise to the top” and become “elite” and of course they’re handsomely rewarded for that. They “deserve” it. 

Sometimes athletics is used as an illustration of rising through merit. An elite athlete outcompetes other athletes to succeed in ways that can be objectively measured. Running faster. Jumping higher. Throwing a ball farther, more accurately, faster. What’s left out of this illustrative story is that most people are not born with physical characteristics enabling them to become elite athletes. It doesn’t matter how much hard work, discipline, and dedication you have to, say, sprinting, American football or basketball if you don’t have the physical characteristics needed to excel in those activities. 

So maybe athletics is not the perfect meritocracy, because the underlying idea of meritocracy is that the starting situation is equality, and individual meritorious effort results in deserved inequality. You can be born too short to excel in basketball, too small to excel in American football, and not everybody is athletic. 

But “work” is also used as an illustration. Children in the US used to be assured that “anybody can become President. As for careers, if you just put in the hard work, discipline, and dedication, you, too, could be a doctor and receive that upper-middle-class compensation. In business, if you just worked as hard as Tim Cook, you, too, can become the CEO of the biggest company in the world. So if arrive at, say, mid career and find that you’re not a doctor, not Tim Cook, and maybe even unhappy about your job, well, sorry but it’s all because of your “merit” (or lack of it) so don’t complain. You’re getting what you deserve. 

This “merit” stuff is made worse by spillover from careers to society itself. Careers that convey more status on incumbents, and it’s all entangled with money. Even if you don’t have a high-status career, or any career at all, if you happen to have a lot of money, you have status. Even without any talent or putting in any hard work, discipline, or dedication. If you meet someone and discover they work as a landscaper, your attitude toward them probably changes, even if subtly. Maybe it’s self-interest; after all, contact with a landscaper is not going to help your personal attempts to enhance your social standing. But what if you discover this particular landscaper has a PhD in quantum physics, has authored numerous papers in that field, and is helping with his cousin’s landscaping business? Or what if you find out the landscaper is actually a top executive with Monsanto, and she’s doing one of those “secret boss” things? Even though their activity is exactly the same, your attitude toward the person changes. You have granted them more merit. 

This means that “merit” really exists only in your mind. It’s an abstraction; an illusion. As David Graeber put it, the false coin of our own dreams. Taking this a step further, I don’t dispute that hard work, discipline, and dedication can be good things. But do they have anything to do with your value as a person? Your merit? Your worth? They do not. The most important thing in your material and social success is circumstance. Being born into wealth is the most obvious example. Being born with a particular skin color is another, although those with the favored kind of skin sometimes try to argue the point. The place you’re born, where you grow up, what languages you  become fluent in, the education available to you, whether you have a colleague with a job opening on the very day you need one — these are all circumstances that can help you or hurt you. There is nothing you can do about them. 

To be sure, there are many things you can do. If you are a good friend and a reliable colleague, you’re more likely to land that job that turned up so fortunately. If you work with dedication during your education you might be more likely to progress to higher academic levels. But our society is arranged into multiple hierarchies, and it is the hierarchies themselves that mostly determine your status. 

I mentioned that these ideas are very old. The idea of meritocracy comes from many sources, but one ancient one that’s well understood is Confucianism, which is over two thousand years old. For as long as meritocracy has been a coherent set of ideas, people have seen through it and offered alternatives. An almost equally-ancient answer to Confucianism is Daoism, expressed by the philosopher Zhuangzi, who lived about a hundred years after Confucius himself.  

Christine Abigail Tan puts it eloquently: Whereas Confucianism treats worth as something that can be recognised before authority is assigned, Zhuangzi suggests just the opposite: that authority determines who gets counted as worthy. Power, therefore, often does not reflect virtue, but instead has the ability to produce the appearance of virtue. This is how hierarchy manufactures its own moral narrative. Those who rule come to be called righteous.

This is why in our society some people are imprisoned for years for minor offenses, while other people, guilty of much greater crimes, are assessed small (to them) fines or even ignored altogether. The hierarchy manufactures its own moral narrative. As the disgraced and meritless former president Richard Nixon put it: “if the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” 

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