The meritocratic illusion

Valuing merit (and penalizing demerits): this is today’s dominant philosophy. Despite being evoked by all sides of the political spectrum and by every professional group, meritocracy is not only an impractical illusion but is primarily a new form to justify social inequality.

Persuasive and catchy, nowadays the word meritocracy pervades every discourse. Repeated like a saving mantra in every social and professional context, it now appears as the only option that can enfranchise us from cronyism and its disastrous consequences. But does merit (a term as ambiguous as ever) and the evaluative obsession it entails really offer us a way out? Not at all, Codello answers, because the meritocratic vision is not only unfeasible, as it is based on false premises (the equality of starting conditions), but also undesirable, in that it transforms inequality from a social to a natural fact. Indeed, the underlying idea is that everyone - those who make it and those who do not - occupies the place that they “deserve” in the social pyramid: an unquestionable and internalized acknowledgement that leads the “winners” to consider their power justified and the “losers” to accept their own discrimination. The meritocratic idea thus turns, on the one hand, into the triumph of “the government of the best” and, on the other, into a “voluntary servitude”. Ultimately, it is a sophisticated restatement of the principle of inequality.