Meritocracy Games

There's no such thing as a meritocracy, let's get that out of the way right now. If you're a regular here, you've already seen many posts by my hand debunking this ridiculous idea, but here's a short one going over the basics one more time.

Meritocracy is just another fantasy based on individualism. It's linked to stupid ideas like the Great Man Theory, an ancient and completely debunked method of explaining history by the impact of "great men" on its course and their influence over societies. These heroes are of course uniquely influential due to their exquisite natural attributes like a superior intellect, heroic courage, extraordinary leadership abilities, physical strength or even divine inspiration. This extremely narrow and one-sided view completely disregards the simple fact that these so called great men (and women of course, although you'll barely hear proponents of this theory discuss what they regard as "the weaker sex"), are merely the products of their social environments, that the course of history is a complex process of countless decisions made by myriad of people, groups, organizations and institutions.

This "meritocracy" is just a modern version of the great man theory; nowadays you can't get away with the assertion that some people are simply born better that the rest of us. Extraordinary "natural attributes" simply don't fly in a time when we're all equal under God or under the law. So now we're led to believe that the great men of our times have earned their positions of wealth, power and political influence through merit;

Meritocracy (merit, from Latin mereō, and -cracy, from Ancient Greek κράτος kratos 'strength, power') is a political system in which economic goods and/or political power are vested in individual people based on talent, effort, and achievement, rather than wealth or social class. Advancement in such a system is based on performance, as measured through examination or demonstrated achievement.
_{source: Wikipedia}

Widespread belief in this malarkey supports and protects members of the one-percent-club of elevated individuals who themselves believe they really deserve to be in that club. There's this reversal of reasoning going on, and it goes like this: "Jeff Bezos is stupid rich, so he must be almost super-humanly intelligent and hard working!" And then we accept that this man could single handedly solve the world hunger problem, but doesn't. We accept that he borrows money to buy a $500 million yacht instead of paying for it with his own money because it's just another "smart" move in order to avoid paying taxes. We accept that his employees are supported by our tax-dollars because Jeff doesn't pay them enough to survive without government-supplied food-stamps. Hey, it's all legal and he's just being his intelligent self, right? He deserves every penny he's "earned" and the government should leave him alone and not tax him too much, right?

Nah... That ain't right. Amazon, his company, is like society and can do without great men. The company will function just fine without Jeff, just like Apple functions just fine without Steve Jobs. Most of the actual value generated by these companies, is generated by the actual workers. No customer will ever meet mr. Bezos, but they'll meet the delivery persons, who deliver products wrapped in packages by the warehouse employees and transported there by the ship-crews and truck drivers, who all work at least as hard as Jeff and some of which are far more intelligent than Jeff. What determines success is the zip-code you're born in, the jobs and connections your parents have, the schools you're lucky enough to visit, the willingness of your parents to support you in whatever endeavors you decide worth your while; it's a complex matrix of too many factors to even begin to contemplate, and "merit" is somewhere down there near the bottom of the ranking order of those factors. Sure, it helps, but it's far from a decisively determining variable in the equation of success in the capitalist culture we currently inhabit.

Don't believe me? Then I invite you to watch the below linked short video. In it the comparison is made between meritocracy in real life and meritocracy in video games. If you think that skill and practice alone make a great gamer, allow your mind to be changed by this simple and short explanation.

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