Category Archives: Commentary

By Julie Collins

Meritocracy is defined as a political system in which economic goods and/or political power are vested in individual people on the basis of talent, effort, and achievement, rather than factors such as heredity or wealth.

“We don’t live in a meritocracy,” she quietly leaned into her herbal tea, speaking in earnest.

“Sure we do,” I quipped back, taking a slug of strong coffee.  “It’s meritocracy for the rich, or the privileged.”

But who is considered privileged in today’s modern society?  Do they just wander into these positions of privilege, are they born into meritocracy,  or are they handpicked?  The answer is all of the above.

People think, like my herbal tea drinking friend thinks, that because we have the greatest concentration of wealth moving upward to a small handful of people, that this somehow defines a lack of meritocracy.  No, that statistic defines a lack of democracy.   Democracy, when it actually works, allows for the appropriation of wealth and power among the masses.  Workers could essentially own their own means of production, thus making management and CEO’s obsolete, and a system would be in place to lift up those in society who can’t work, to still find a way to live comfortably.  And, in a working democracy, if a creative doesn’t have the talents to be a part of the working class, he could find his place in society elsewhere and thrive in that creative space and still be of use.

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