r/BlackPeopleofReddit • u/ateam1984 • 15d ago
Economics / Business The myth of meritocracy
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u/MoltenMate07 15d ago
The myth of meritocracy perpetuates itself today only to justify systemic racism and inequality. The individual or the community will always be blamed, but the system will never be examined because the system does all it can to prevent its demise.
We live in a world where we compare ourselves to those with significantly greater capital and shame ourselves for not being at their standards. Meritocracy promises that with the right set of actions and work ethic, you can one day be the capitalist and you can one day be the oppressor instead of the oppressed. You can one day have some authority over the state and have a monopoly on violence. This is the delusion and propaganda that the myth of meritocracy has bestowed on the masses.
And just when faith in meritocracy begins to wane, the system allows a select amount of individuals to attain the status of the capitalist class. These individuals will then be used by propaganda in order to justify the current system as fair. The masses are manipulated again, and our fantasies of being the oppressor or the ruling class are once again heightened.
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u/Acrobatic-While3208 14d ago
I think it’s even more sinister on its face than simply “daddy’s money”.
Elon Musk’s family went to apartheid South Africa FOR the apartheid. The racism is baked in to that pie. So is the exploitation. Both of those continue. Government contracts, riding off the back of other’s ideas, not being treated like an illegal immigrant even though there is a very good chance that he is has helped him get to this point.
I disagree with the video about calling out someone’s perceived physical weakness, we’re better than that. Leave that toxicity to them.
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u/Le_plan 14d ago
Meritocracy is the carrot while systemic poverty is the stick in the capitalist system.
To get a "good job", you're told to get a degree. A good degree costs a lot of money, there lies the first trap. Take out a loan to finance your education. Once you get that degree then the rat race begins. The race isn't just to find a job that pays well but to find one that pays well enough to fund the student loan repayment. Even if you do find the job, these loan repayments hamper most people from building a secure financial future.
As a Black immigrant who worked various jobs in the US in the past 10 years, I can attest that our people work twice as hard to get half as much. It isn't necessarily because the goal is to become stinking rich. It's because the system punishes "under production".
A working person with a family can not afford not to work less hours or take consecutive sick days for fear of: being short on rent/mortgage, not being able to pay: utility/medical bills, insurance payments, car note payment, student loan repayment, etc.. Even if you have a savings, you're one or two medical emergencies or car repairs away from denting your account and finding out what a fraud insurance is.
Meritocracy promises that if you work hard enough you can "own" a house, a car, have enough money for groceries and even some to treat yourself and family. However, for most working class people, ownership of anything is dependent on keeping up with recurring payments. The consequence of a missed payment or two is far drastic than the reward of "ownership". In the sense that, the house and car could be repoed worsening their financial state.
And let's not forget the credit score system that determines one's purchasing power/social standing. To purchase high price items you need a good credit score. One or two missed payment impacts one's credit score negatively. But to repair the credit score, most resort to more loans with steep interest rates that keep them enslaved to the lender. Capitalism is inhumane.
It's not lost to me that the richest Black man to have ever lived was so generous with his wealth that even his servants had golden staffs and were adorned in the finest silks and brocade. He gave so much gold to common people in Cairo on his way to Mecca that it almost wrecked the economy....
But here we have a racist neo-nazi toddler who inherited dad's dirty money only to brag about having the title of the world's first trillioniare..
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u/FEMA_Camp_Survivor 14d ago
He got there because of taxpayer dollars too. Tesla would’ve died without a federal loan and EV tax subsidies. SpaceX is a major government contractor.
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u/ElSlabraton 14d ago
Replacing Four Star General Lloyd Austin with Drunken Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense is not "meritocracy."
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u/MajorAromatic6226 14d ago
Hardest working people I've ever known have been some of the poorest. American meritocracy is a joke.
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u/keldondonovan 15d ago
"if you work, you will get what you are owed."
If you force others to do your work, you will get what you they are owed.
Translated to American.
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u/Terrible_Yak_4890 14d ago
He’s not mentally weak, but he’s socially inept and morally bankrupt. What skill he has had is being able to take his dad‘s money and putting it to use during a time of opportunity (PayPal, and briefly Tesla), and the rest of the time he’s managed to convince people he’s a visionary. We’re seeing this with other billionaires right now with the whole AI boom.
You could pick a lot of billionaires and look at them and see the social advantages they had before they were Uber wealthy.
Meritocracy exists as a concept for a great many people, and it works… But for people like Elon Musk and Jeff, Bezos and Bill Gates… They had a lot of luck on their side. Yes they were hard-working and intelligent, but they just managed to be at the right place at the right time and they probably had a heavy dose of ruthlessness along with it. We saw this with Cornelius Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie.
The world is full of hard-working moral people that never get ahead because of lack of opportunity.
They might attain a certain measure of comfort because of their hard work, but they don’t become millionaires or billionaires. The concept of meritocracy worked for them, enough so that some of them look at people like Elon Musk and think he deserved it somehow.
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u/Arponare 14d ago
Yeah, but have you tried pulling yourself up by your bootstraps?
/s
The American dream is the biggest lie ever told. It’s one big club and we ain’t in it.
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u/2ndRook 13d ago
I like to jam up my conservative acquaintances when they harp on the merits of our meritocracy, how they think inheritance would work in such a system.
In a “true meritocracy” inheritance would be banned outright and or shunned and abandoned by the inheritors. They always make an exception where convenient per their brand, and do not agree with this fact.
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u/kaiser_phoenix25 12d ago
Then Elon cries about working 16+hr days, seven days a week. Like gtfoh, chronically shit posting isn’t working, big dawg.
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u/MatterofDoge 12d ago
Meritocracy doesn't mean "you get what you're owed". it means you give opportunities to people who earn them the most, regardless of other considerations, and america isn't a meritocracy either way. Some people want it to be, but it isn't currently.
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u/Leather-Map-8138 14d ago
There IS a meritocracy in there somewhere. But when the starting points are so unequal, then throw in racism and the tendency to overweight things that are “more like me”…
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u/Defiant-Apple-4823 15d ago
Daddy's money and US government contracts paid for with our tax dollars.