On Meritocracy and Nazism

The word ‘meritocracy’ was coined by Michael Young in his 1958 book, Rise of the Meritocracy. Wikipedia has the following to say about it: ‘The term was intended to be pejorative, and his book was set in a dystopian future in which one’s social place is determined by IQ plus effort.’ How unfortunate, then, that meritocracy is now deeply ingrained into the very fabric of Western society.

Meritocracy is supposedly a system which avoids privileges of wealth and ‘friends in high places’, by replacing these means of social mobility and success with that of talent, competence and ability. If you work hard enough and you have the requisite ‘skills’, so Brown, Sarkozy and Blair (that embodiment of meritocratic success, i.e. war criminal) inform us, then you’ll really be ‘getting on’ – you’ll be ‘going places’.

There are three responses to this. Firstly, who decides what counts as ‘success’? I don’t remember having had any say, for example, in the designation of the position of CEO at BAE Systems as being ‘successful’. It seems an odd sort of system that regards the chief of a global murder machine as offering anything valuable whatsoever. But then meritocracy is not democratic, and so what we may class as socially desirable is ignored.

Secondly, and less dramatically, meritocracy simply doesn’t do what it says on the tin. The assumption is that it avoids the inequalities which wealth and Old Boy contacts bring about, but this simply isn’t so. A child born into a middle-class family has infinitely more chances of ‘getting on’ in this world than a child born into a working class family. (As may now be clear, however, this in itself is not saying much). Middle-class families tend to have lots of books around, they teach their children to read before they go to school, they take them to museums, they teach them how to ‘talk properly’, they know how to play the system if their child is in trouble: they equip their child, that is to say, with the cultural equivalent of money because they have the money to do so in the first place.

Finally, and most importantly, meritocracy is a form of fascism. Its logic is as follows: the natural inequalities of body, race, ability, and so on are equated with what an individual deserves to receive from life in general. If you’re intelligent, white and ruthless, it’s likely you’ll go far in the world; if you’re black, disabled and have a low IQ, you deserve, the system tells us, to live a life of poverty. There is only one logical step between this and the Nazi approach to the Jews: meritocracy merely condemns to wretchedness people who fail to meet bureaucratic standards; the Nazis killed them.

The ‘social ladder’ doesn’t lead upwards; it descends into an inferno. The point is not to climb it, but to smash it to pieces.