Scary stuff.
As I got older, I've leaned more and more into meritocracy.
If we did something like this in the US, we'd have quite a religious/irrational group of leaders. Whereas with a meritocracy, you have at least some filter. The status quo requires politicians to have a bit of an understanding of human nature. Its not flawless, I've seen inferior people beat superiors by using biases, but these were relatively equal races. I've also seen idiots run for office and never catch steam.
We can also look at history and see that society's that did anything with such equal democratic distribution were less efficient than those who had some sort of merit.
This one specifically is amusing because in my opinion you do have quite a religious/irrational group of leaders in the US.
But that's not to say that wouldn't also be the case otherwise.
The fundamental problem with any purportedly meritocratic arrangement is that you need someone to define the evaluation criteria for what "merit" is, and then someone else to administer the examination. Both are vulnerabilities in the system that lead to formation of a "merit caste" (which sets and enforces standards that favor its members) in the long run, as evidenced by historical examples of states that tried explicit meritocracy.
you need someone to define the evaluation criteria for what "merit" is
simple: let voters decide. that is, eliminate the concept of pre-selected candidates and let voters select candidates from the entire population. if you need 10 people, give everyone 10 votes. everyone has a different idea what merrit is, but by giving everyone multiple votes the people for which the most voters think they have merrit will emerge as the winners of the election.
I don't think the result would be functionally very different from what we have at the moment. You'd still end up with a slate of candidates that have enough money (or are provided enough money by interest groups) to have the largest megaphone, and the competition would then be among them.
In any case, that's just a more chaotic form of representative democracy. It's most certainly not meritocratic in any sense.
Voters thought Donald Trump and Joe Biden had merit. Clearly the voters are not a trustworthy source of discernment.
That is not because voters are stupid. It is because they are rationally ignorant. Why spend hours researching the issues and candidates for a 1 in 10 million chance of having an impact? It makes no sense. However, if we instead convened "elector juries" of a couple hundred randomly selected citizens and gave them the resources to carefully research and vet the candidates before deliberating on who is best, I think they would do a pretty good job.
> Voters thought Donald Trump and Joe Biden had merit. Clearly the voters are not a trustworthy source of discernment.
It isn't about being discerning. If you are going to vote and you are a swing/politically agnostic voter in a two party system (like the US/UK) you have the following three choices really:
* Vote for the least bad candidate / lesser of two evils.
* Protest Vote. In the US this would be probably the Libertarian Party / Green Party. In England this would be Reform / Liberal Democrats / Greens etc.
* Spoil the Ballet / Abstain from voting.
Red/Blue Team diehards aren't worth talking about as they don't decide elections. It is the swing voters.
> Why spend hours researching the issues and candidates for a 1 in 10 million chance of having an impact? It makes no sense.
It makes no sense because you have two actual choices (Red Team / Blue Team) or effectively to choose to not participate.
Additionally most politically agnostic that are over the age of 30 have worked out that you get shafted whoever you vote for.
I mean, that's just a popularity contest. People with the greatest media presence will get the most votes, because they are known by the most people. Even if I had a very precise idea of what merit was to me, I have no idea who in the world would best fit my criterion and I wouldn't be able to vote for them.
But the current metric of merit is "ability to win elections". That gives us representatives who are not there to make things better, but to set themselves up to win the next election. This sometimes means, for example, prolonging the problem that they got elected to solve, because they can use that problem to win the next election.
"As I got older, I've leaned more and more into meritocracy"
Sad thing is, that it's impossible.
Typically we settle in moneytocracy…
We do have the persistent cultural myth that money = merit[1][2], so it's not entirely different.
1. Acres of Diamonds. Russell Conwell. 1900. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/rconwellacresofdia...
2. The Gospel of Wealth. Andrew Carnegie. 1889. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Gospel_of_Wealth
MHO: the myth is broader: that everybody gets more or less what he deserves. I have heard many times, justification of why person X is poor, pointing he is lazy, wastes money in alcohol, etc. but I have seen poor people, and is (typically) not the case. The problem is, when people is poor, there are no pleasures, often only alcohol is a way out. Only people who were there or had vey near people in that situation understand what is like to be poor…
OTOH, people think that rich people made it by hard working.
I’m not saying there is no correlation whatsoever. But there is much less than most think, and great amounts of luck playing a bigger role, including, but not limited to, where you were born, family, contacts, etc.
The belief in a just world is a collective coping mechanism that protects us from the ugly truth of cosmic injustice and the reality that the only justice we have in the world is that which we make.
Often the people who benefit from injustice are the very ones we've tasked with creating justice. It's easier to believe justice will appear on its own than to face the mess of making it ourselves.