XiphosAletheria t1_j11c4pv wrote on December 20, 2022 at 11:11 PM

Reply to comment by Meta_Digital in Anarchism at the End of the World: A defence of the instinct that won’t go away by Sventipluk

Merit is simply effectiveness at whatever task you are doing. A janitor who is on the ball and keeps everything spic and span is a meritorious janitor. A doctor who repeatedly gets the best medical outcomes for his patients is a meritorious doctor. A CEO who maximizes profit and makes his company millions is a meritorious CEO. Some qualities tend to make people more meritorious across a wide variety of tasks - being conscientious, hard working, intelligent, etc., especially in combination. And I don't think it is particularly insane to want doctors who are good at doctoring, or politicians who are good at politics, or chefs who are good at cooking. It is probably impossible to have a pure meritocracy, given our tribal tendencies, but some systems are more meritocratic than others, and we should prefer those.

Meta_Digital t1_j11djdc wrote on December 20, 2022 at 11:21 PM

Okay, and I generally agree with this, but the issue seems to emerge when we're talking about organizing a society in a way that those with "merit" have undue power over those who supposedly don't.

Does Elon Musk have more merit than his Tesla or Twitter employees?

Does Joe Biden or Donald Trump have more merit than most of the US?

What even are the merits of Exxon? The Federal Reserve? The World Bank? The CIA? NATO? Do they have justification for the immense power they have over so many people's lives?

It's simple when we're talking about simple roles like a doctor or a janitor, but it gets far more complicated when we structure entire governments and massive national and transnational organizations around vague ideas of "merit". Can we even justify the existence of many of these organizations at all? What do we even mean by "merit" with reference to them?

Most of the discussion surrounding the failures of these organizations concerns the idea that the "wrong" people are at the top of them. If only Trump were president, then X would happen. If only Biden were president, then Y would happen. Yet the same system elevates both equally. Perhaps the fact that the wrong people keep getting into power comes down to the system simply working as it's supposed to work and that the ideas that went into the system are what's at fault. This would be the anarchist critique.

XiphosAletheria t1_j12npuo wrote on December 21, 2022 at 5:33 AM

I think the problems you are talking about are less system specific and more a matter of scale. We evolved to live in tribes of 150 or so people, and instead live in nations of millions, or in many cases, tens of millions or hundreds of millions. And at that scale any sociopolitical system is going to suffer from terrible distortions and breakdowns. The issue with Biden and Trump isn't that one is the right person and the other is wrong. It's that one is right for millions of people and wrong for millions more, and so is the other. And there are millions more for whom they are both wrong.

Likewise, people like Musk benefit from the fact that, at high enough scales, you can add a small amount of value to a large amount of things to make an awful lot of money. And money itself in large enough amounts can be used to generate more money simply by manipulating the system rather than through generating productive value.

But no system you design is going to avoid those sorts of problems at our current scale. Any system complex enough to handle things will also provide opportunities that those running it can exploit. And the very scale means you do need someone running things, because the alternative is anarchy in the sense it's detractors mean, violent chaos leading to endless warfare.