Sohrab Ahmari, a visiting fellow of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University, has written a fascinating article for the American Conservative exploring why our meritocratic overlords got the response to the pandemic so badly wrong in spite of their scientific and technological expertise. The answer, he says, can be found in The Rise of the Meritocracy, an extraordinarily prophetic dystopian satire written by my father in 1958 which anticipated many of the missteps made by the meritocratic elite over the last two years. Here are the first few paragraphs:
The COVID-19 pandemic is so complex, so vast in scale, that I doubt any single future historian will be able to tell a unified story about the crisis and the global response to it. And any journalist or scholar attempting a synthesis today will find his work hampered by the fog of war that clouds many aspects of a still-‘live’ world-historical event. Yet if there’s one central thematic thread deserving urgent attention, surely it’s the question of meritocracy.
To wit: How did the West’s meritocratic elites, with all their scientific-technological prowess, end up driving their societies into a ditch of distrust, rancor, and division? What led the meritocracy to badly overplay its hand on lockdowns, masking, social distancing and, above all, vaccine mandates, triggering explosive popular uprisings like the one in Canada? It won’t do for the meritocracy’s apologists to blame the unenlightened and irrational mass of people who refuse to comply with what’s good for them, which would amount to circular reasoning: The whole promise of meritocratic governance is that the ruling class’s sheer intelligence and ability can overcome the messy antagonisms of ‘ordinary’ politics – yet that, evidently, has not be the case.
Why?
We’d do well to turn to Michael Young, the British sociologist, Labour party peer, and author who coined the word ‘meritocracy’ in a dystopian novel first published in 1958. The novel, The Rise of the Meritocracy, proved enormously influential on our side of the pond, especially among such heterodox thinkers as Christopher Lasch and Michael Lind. And deservedly so, for Young masterfully grasped trends underway in his time and projected them into the future.
I made many of the same points, linking Trump’s victory and Brexit to the arrogance and hubris of the meritocratic elite, in a half-hour documentary for Radio 4 in 2017 that you can listen to here. And last year at the Lockdown Summit, too. If you click on the 6hr 3m mark, you’ll see me holding forth on the failures of our meritocratic overlords and worrying about the forthcoming populist revolt, with Will striking a more sober note at the end.
Sohrab’s piece is worth reading in full.
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Q: How did the West’s meritocratic elites, with all their scientific-technological prowess, end up driving their societies into a ditch of distrust, rancor, and division?
A: Because that was their intention.
So, is it simply that the meritocratic overlords had such a level of self-belief that they were right, that they failed to check whether they actually were?
By their own lights they are not ”mishandling” it at all.
(I do wish people will stop referring to them as ”elite”. They’re not – and it’s what they call themselves. Why reinforce their own self-estimation? Let’s find another word for them.)
Ah, Franciscan university. Sound people, and I think they’ve been on the case of the New World Order for a long time.
The Civil Service is neither civil nor a service. It needs to be reformed out of existence in it’s current form. The first reform should be that non-performance gets you sacked. Not knighted.
So that’s where Toby got his urbane good looks from.
In the mid-1990s I was studying computer science (or rather, the German bastardization of that) at Fachhochschule Mannheim. As usual for undergrads, we were tormented with lots of uninteresting, arcane and completely irrelvant mathematics instead of being taught anything related to the supposed subject of our studies. I still fondly remember a phrase of the guy who held the calculus lectures: You have to be creative when solving integration problems!
By that time, I only understood that this meant the methods he was teaching us were unsuitable for solving the exercises we had to solve (which made the whole lecture seem rather pointless). Now, more than 25 years older and a lot wiser, I also understand the creative. It meant You have to locate the guy in the library who’s selling the solutions from last year. And that’s the general method our meritocratic elite uses to recruit up-and-coming talent.
What ‘meritocratic elite’?
Everyone knows mainly psychos get to the top.
Blair’s misuse of Meritocracy reminds me very starkly of his fellow murderer, George W Bush, who used Born In The USA as his anthem for his campaign. He had no idea, and nor did his lackeys, the combined Meritocracy, that the words condemn the USA.
To understand “meritocracy” is equivalent to understanding “aristocracy”. Neither are there on merit. They exist because of their own entitlement.
If judged on performance, achievement, kindness, real service to people (not Civil Service), how many of the meritocracy or aristocracy come out with any actual Merit? Two? None? What does any of them achieve, or give of themselves? They have lackeys to do all the work, they just deliver the speeches and take the credit.
I think the author needs to ask the question that those inside the system asked the best part of 20 years ago:
‘Does publishing a slew of papers prove anything more than you are a highly accomplished technician, or does it also indicate evidence of the ability of sifting the wheat from the chaff in novel situations of high uncertainty and high complexity?’
This comes to the heart of ‘meritocratic elitism’: how accurately does the number of papers you have published reflect your true brilliance/expertise and is your expertise in one narrow field more widely transferable to new ones?
My experience of the scientific community was that most that rose to the top found top level strategy ‘the most difficult’, whereas those like me who found it the proverbial ‘piece of p**s’ but struggled terrible with the supposedly ‘simple’ technical drudgeries moved out long before reaching the top would ever have been possible.
So what you have is an ‘elite’ marked by intellectual mediocrity (within the rarified atmosphere of higher degree elitism) and technocratic excellence.
Of course, it’s never that black and white, but the point is simple: how you select out your ‘elite’ determines what unique elite skills… Read more »
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10542205/MPs-slam-ministers-waste-loss-fraud-Covid-response.html
What the ‘Elite’ get so wrong is their believe they are better than the common man – their arrogance will always bring them down!
Here we go. Cyber Polygon live exercise is go. See you all after the internet blackout! (Maybe)
Canadian trucker beaten by police during Freedom Convoy says cops ‘broke my body a little bit, but not my spirit’
https://www.theblaze.com/news/canadian-trucker-beaten-by-police-during-freedom-convoy-says-cops-broke-my-body-a-little-bit-but-not-my-spirit
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I came to the comments to write a take down of this confused intellectual garbage only to find pretty much everyone else already has.
The DS BTL section really is a great place.
Absolutely ditto, about 30 seconds later.
Boris Johnson has announced the latest sanctions against Russia.
Instead of paying £250 000 to play a game of tennis with Boris Russian oligarchs will now have to pay £350 000.
Naturally they will still get the policy change they desire for this.
Start-point: those in government are unemployable at any significant level in the wealth producing sector of the economy otherwise that is where they would be.
The characteristics required for the midden that is ‘politics’ require a high score on the psychopath/sociopath scale of characteristics – the very sort of people who lust for power and control.
Don’t confuse high intelligence with ability, or being smart – some of the dumbest people are very intelligent. And there is the mistaken view that a very clever person, expert in one thing must be expert in all.
i don’t think those at the top have changed, it’s the rest below.
’We The People’ have allowed themselves to become almost completely dependent on the State, so the idiots in charge are able to have a greater affect on our lives than ever before.
Plus: specialisation and division of labour made us interdependent, we swapped with each other what we produced so we benefitted from the endeavours if others (who benefitted from us) so we had more than otherwise if we produced only fir our selves.
This makes a very stable, peaceful, prosperous society. But since WWII, more and more… Read more »
Ayn Rand was right.
Indeed. Of the barmy extreme right.
Having thought long and hard about how we’ve got to where we are I have come to the conclusion that the key turning point was 9/11. Specifically the US’s reaction to 9/11.
Up to the point we were reaping the benefits of the Thatcher-Reagan revolution that slimmed down the state and deregulated the economy. We could move around with more freedom than ever and most importantly economic freedom was greater than ever. The interference of the state in our lives was minimal.
Things changed after 9/11 as the US government started to reverse course. Rather than treat the event like a criminal act and pursue the wrongdoers, it started to control and regulate the behaviour of everyone. All of a sudden we all began to be treated like potential terrorists. The Patriot Act expanded the powers of the state. Departments like Homeland Security were set up to control and surveil everyone. The new dynamic was that the state had the power and obligation to control the population to protect itself. It was the beginning of a more totalitarian approach to governance.
The next big change came with the financial crisis. This invited once the again governments, led by the US… Read more »
Stewart, if you accept that 9/11 was instigated by US government agents, perhaps CIA, and that it was intended to ramp up the so-called war on terror, which had been promoted worldwide in order to usher in more restrictive laws, then what follows makes perfect sense.
9/11, the London bombings, France etc all paved the way for grosser state interventions, more surveillance, greater digitalisation. The intention clearly to normalise state interruptions to our lives, to make acceptable what ten or fifteen years ago would have seemed excessively intrusive.
Like virtually everything that has gone wrong in this country in the last twenty odd years, the worst of it can be found to have its origins with Bliar.
I would say that’s all true but actually independent of whether 9/11 was an inside job or not.
Same with the virus (which turned out to be not all that terrible really). Whether it was released on purpose or by accident, the effect ends up being the same.
Those who are driving for greater state control in our lives could be instigating the crises or just waiting for them to happen.
“we were reaping the benefits of the Thatcher-Reagan revolution”
Hilarious – what we have now is the logical outcome of their idiocracy.
Let us not forget that Reagan gave us the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. According to the US Supreme Court decision of 2011, that Act “preempts all design-defect claims against vaccine manufacturers brought by plaintiffs who seek compensation for injury or death caused by vaccine side effects”.
The response to 9/11 demonstrated that frightened people would accept harsh restrictions and believe all manner of absurdities – to name but one, turning a plane around in flight because someone had written BOB on a toilet mirror in lipstick. This apparently meant “Bomb on Board”. When I rolled my eyes at this, I was told – “You can’t be too careful!”
The Global Financial Crisis demonstrated that criminal behaviour by extremely wealthy individuals and organisations would not result in their punishment. Some of them, at least, discovered that they really could get away with blue murder.
Criminal behaviour has always existed. And the powerful have always got away with things.
Prior to 9/11, when something bad happened, like a terrorist attack or a recession, it just happened, we coped and moved on. It didn’t lead to a societal transformation driven by an encroaching state apparatus.
I remember growing up with the threat of terrorism. It was put into perspective. It was nasty and horrible for the victims, but very unlikely to hit you personally. It was dealt with mostly as a criminal matter.
We also used to have recessions and unemployment. They were bad times which we lived through but knew would pass. They were recognised as economic cycles.
SInce 9/11, for whatever reason, the state has taken on this responsibility for nothing bad ever happening and when it does it is structural flaw in society that has to be corrected, more likely than not with constraints and restrictions on the population and more power to the state.
I don’t pretend to know why it’s like that. I am just observing what has happened.
I don’t really see how.
What we are seeing now that I particularly object to is the encroachment of the state in our daily lives, which is the opposite of what Reagan and Thatcher pushed for.
‘now about 50% of the population have nothing to trade so the State plunders the productive 50% and redistributes it to a parasite class.’
This ‘parasite class’ were once industrial workers but when our glorious leaders opened competion with China our business and the workers found competing with slave labour a bit much.
Any inquiries will decide that it was generally well handled except for a few areas where “lessons will be learned”. Those lessons will be that we should have locked down sooner and harder.
So no, it will not be their undoing.
The COVID-19 pandemic is so complex, so vast in scale, that I doubt any single future historian will be able to tell a unified story about the crisis and the global response to it.
And thereafter this article gets buried under its own cleverness.
There is nothing complex about a simple Scam, nothing “vast in scale.”
Let’s summarise:
Start with a propoganda war, thousands infected, people dying in the streets, hospitals overwhelmed or soon to be, ratchet up the propoganda, only a vaccine can save us, more propoganda, the vaccine is on its way.
Crank up the propoganda, killer virus, vaccines coming, lockdown, in it together, do your bit. Vaccines are coming. Be afraid. Vaccines are coming.
Have a break.
Whoops, here comes another wave, run and hide. Vaccines are coming. Have you looked her in the eyes (beyond a mask)?
Vaccines are coming.
Right you lot, we knocked this brew up in record quick time so roll your sleeves up.
Hundreds of thousands of adverse reactions, thousands of deaths. Thousands more to come.
Phase One more or less gone to plan.
This is a poor piece of work which seeks to intellectualise a very simple operation:
To get… Read more »
Handy link here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ox8fqPCbMM
Carl Sagan Predicted The Current Junk Science Disaster
I thought Meritocracy was a bad thing, having people who were competent doing the thing they are good at. Shouldn’t people be put into a job/situation based on gender, ethnicity, religion, disability etc (white males being the lowest of the low)?
I seem to recall it was Genghis Khan who stormed a large part of the world and got to Vienna (before he died and the advance stopped) based on Meritocracy. He had Generals who had formally been Shepard’s but were good at their jobs. Just think how much future he’d of got if had used diversity and equality (I doubt he’d of got out of the tent).
Labour Party Peer who coined the term ‘meritocracy’ – well there’s irony.
Socialist don’t believe in merit, they believe in equality. The truth is it isn’t a meritocracy that has risen, it is mediocrity that has risen, a standard which few of those risen have achieved.
The Rise of Meritocracy, was written as a satire and a dystopian one.
I have my bitch’s copy on the desk and yes, a dystopian satire. Hardly a novel. What does catch the eye is the rise of the Populists against the New World Order of social fascists (or meritocracy). There lies our only hope, honk, honk.
During the pandemic farce the politcos and media kept talking about ‘our NHS’ so as to make people believe it was something that they were a part of, something we had in common.
Similarly we regularly hear Boris et al talking about ‘our democracy’ and how precious it is.
From my perspective it is not ‘our democracy’, it is their democracy and it is a curse that is seeing this nation and our people destroyed.
What on earth are ‘Meritocratic Elites’?
The elites have reached their position on the basis of everything except merit.
That puzzled me too. Maybe it’s merit in who can oink the loudest?
I think, to be honest, that Sohrab Ahmari, has reached his conclusion because he’s an illiterate moron who rejects man’s mind to such an extent that words have no meaning to him.
As for the response to Covid, it can be explained in two words: green ideology.
Observe that the most illiberal responses to Covid have been from those who are also enthusiastic greens, observe that doomsday cultism is common to both, apocalyptic fantasies presented as science are common to both.
Green ideology has been taught as fact for decades and been put into practice, it’s as simple as that.
Also, before the ‘modern’ greens, the Nazis and the Nationalists of Weimar Germany were anti-industrial, the Nazis being both green and brown, as it were.
“What on earth are ‘Meritocratic Elites’?”
How people get appointed and promoted to senior positions in the NHS by “People like Me”
What meritocracy? Most of the ‘elites’ get there because of WHO they know (i.e. sychophancy, chumocracy or nepotism, take your pick) not how good they are technically or, just as important, how ethically and sensibly they apply that knowledge.
‘Failing upwards’ is a commen theme amongst the ‘elites’ in both the public sector and multinational businesses (and is creeping into smaller sized outfits too), not just politics and the media.
The problem is that they effectively ‘poison’ their own sector by such agendas, driving good people out or away from trying to join, because its too much trouble.
At some point (hopefully sooner rather than later) we all need to push back, and hard. And that will including stepping up to take the place of these people when needed. Too many people think that ‘someone else’ will always shoulder the burden.
Well, that time is well past now. I’ve seen this myself at local level where I live where residents don’t bother taking an active part in keeping their locale and community in good order – quite the opposite in fact.
The pandemic has brough both the best and worst out in people – at least it means, slowly, at… Read more »
The technocratic overlords have not made mistakes.
They lied about a deadly disease and then rolled out a plan that has concentrated their power and secured them massive amounts of additional wealth.
They have been able to take a great leap forward in terms of the vaccine passport roll out, digital ID and soon digital only money.
In addition they have ascertained that 90%+ of the population will obey whatever order they are given no matter how dangerous or stupid it is.
I basically agree but hope and believe that your figure of 90% is too low.
Only they know how many they’ve jabbed. I believe they may be unpleasantly surprised at the level of resistance they have now met, together with the mrna jabs failing even with or because of the relatively benign omicron.
It would be interesting to know how many jabbed will never have another.
And all this is with them using the MSM et. as a propaganda machine.
I think they have underestimated the resistance – I certainly hope so.
And when the “vax side effects” continue and increase, even the dimmest sheep might wake up.
Maybe not…
The reality is that the majority of those who work their way to the top have not actually done anything, they have never lived or existed in the real world
What do I mean ‘do anything’. I mean for example they never had to graft to earn a living, never been up at 4am in the freezing rain waiting for a bus to work, never had blisters on their hands
A good example of this is the Dictator. Eton, University, writing for The Spectator. A sheltered and cossetted life. A man who fathered children with no thought of actually looking after them. or setting an example or guiding them. A man who ditched his wife when she had cancer
The exact opposite of these elites are the supermarket checkout workers (and others) who carried on regardless and quickly realised it was all bull. better one them runs the country
Look, it has been the most gigantic racket. People who identify too much by social class are not very good at seeing it – truckers are for instance.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is so complex …”
No pandemic. Not that complex – just comprehensive.
… and certainly not driven by ‘meritocracy’, which is not the same as elite hierarchy. Countries vary in the precise nature their elites, but they have never been primarily meritocratic in Michael Young’s sense. Follow the money.
The answer is no because the official mainstream view will be it wasn’t mishandled. Anyone thinking otherwise will be labeled as a racist right wing conspiracy theorist.