 Meritocracy is the sweet lie we are told to make capitalism seem fair. But is this lie really all that sweet? Is meritocracy something good to strive for, or is it trash? Citigroup is the financial service corporation that owns Citibank, and it is the third largest banking institution in the United States. Back in 2005 and 2006, Citigroup wrote three confidential memos to their major investors. And in these memos, Citigroup openly and quite gleefully confessed to some ugly truths. To quote from the memo, the U.S., U.K. and Canada are world leaders in plutonomy. Okay, and what is plutonomy? According to Citigroup's memo, they are societies where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few. In a plutonomy, there is no such animal as the U.S. consumer, or the U.K. consumer, or indeed the Russian consumer. There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the non-rich, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie. The memo declared the rich as the new aristocracy, who was happily enjoying their ride on board the gravy train. Well, that all sounds fine and dandy, at least if you're rich enough to be one of Citigroup's major investors who this memo was addressed to. However, Citigroup did see a potential problem that could spoil this glorious utopia of extreme inequality. What could go wrong? asked Citigroup in memo number three. We think the most potent and short-term threat would be societies demanding a more equitable share of wealth. Uh oh, sounds like trouble. After all, the vast majority of people are not capitalists, are not rich, and at any time they could indeed decide to push for a bigger piece of that economic pie. A troubling and terrifying thought if there ever was one. Which leads to the question, why do so many working-class people passively accept such a blatantly unfavorable situation? Citigroup itself asked this question and attempted to provide an answer. Perhaps one reason that societies allow plutonomy is because enough of the electorate believe they have a chance of becoming a Pluto participant. Why kill it off if you can join it? In a sense, this is the embodiment of the American Dream. American Dream? More like American Scheme? Am I right, ladies? So in other words, you too can become rich. Just keep working hard, don't cause trouble, and don't complain about the boot that is stomping your face into the dirt. After all, one day you might wear that boot. That's the dream. Because the owners of this country know the truth. It's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it. At the heart of the American Dream is the myth of meritocracy. And it's not just in the United States. Many countries are deeply steeped in the myth of meritocracy. So what is a meritocracy? It's a hypothetical social system where economic rewards, career status, and political power are doled out to individuals based on merit. Their talent, intelligence, effort, and so on. In a meritocracy, advancement, achievement, and success are based on individual performance. As part of my research for this video, I looked up the word merit in the dictionary. Yes, yes, I admit that's something I had to do, which may cause you to decide that I lack the merit to make this video, or have a YouTube channel, or be allowed to do things like tie my own shoes without close supervision. But the truth is that I've been tying my shoes all on my own for years, okay? And also, I often like to look up words that I already know the definition of so that I can clarify or enhance my understanding. I swear, I definitely knew what merit meant. Anyways, according to dictionary.com, merit, when used as a verb, means to be worthy of, deserve. The myth of meritocracy says, our system is fair because people get what they deserve. The myth of meritocracy says, the rich earned their wealth through their talent and hard work. The myth of meritocracy says, the poor can get rich too if they're talented and hardworking enough. The myth of meritocracy says, you are infinitely free in this free market universe. It's a con, a trick, a lie. And one that's very, very useful for the rich and powerful, because it helps convince the rest of us to support, applaud, and even worship the capitalist system that makes their wealth and power possible and makes our exploitation and oppression inevitable. As city groups said in their memo, the myth of meritocracy keeps us from rebelling against plutocracy. And not to mention, it also allows them to feel superior. I am definitely superior. Now, at this point, I could launch into a detailed, evidenced-based argument to prove that meritocracy is nothing but a myth. But I rather we turn our attention to something meritocracy related that doesn't get talked about much, but is nonetheless much more interesting. But first, because there probably are some people watching this who are true and ardent believers in the meritocracy myth, let's just give a brief and breezy response to these true believers. I'll write all you simps for the system. I have just one question for you. If we really live in a meritocracy, then why is your boss such an idiot? OK, point proven, now time for part three. What, that wasn't good enough? OK, fine. Many myths are based on grains of truth. The meritocracy myth is no exception. There really are people who climbed out of poverty and up the economic ladder due to hard work, talent, and persistence. But it also takes a whole lot of luck. And for every person who climbs out of poverty, there are many more who work just as hard and with just as much talent and persistence who never managed to do the same. And many of the people high on the ladder are there even though they lack the merit of those below them. To a great extent, this occurs because people receive a combination of unearned advantages and unearned disadvantages throughout their life, starting from the moment they're born. Those lucky enough to be born to rich parents will receive many unearned advantages. And on the flip side, those who are born poor will inherit many unearned disadvantages. Not least among these differing advantages is inheritance. According to a 2007 survey, Americans from the richest percentile inherit an average of $2.7 million. And thanks to the magic of capitalism, if you inherit a huge amount of money, you can invest it in the stock market and then sit back and watch while it grows to double or triple its original value. Meanwhile, working class people are also doubling or tripling what they have. Debt. The income level of the family you're born into has a huge influence on your quality of education, like what will be the quality of the schools you attend? Will you have a private tutor? And also, will your parents pay your college tuition? Because if you have to go into debt tens of thousands of dollars, you might decide not to go to college at all. And if you're born to a wealthy family, you'll likely be connected to people who have high-level management positions in various companies and who can help you land a high-paying job. The result of all this is that, in most cases, kids grow up to be about as rich or as poor as their parents, as shown in this graph right here. Wow, what a surprise. I am very shocked. Another very not surprising thing is that people who have a college degree but grew up poor are two and a half times less likely to make a high income than people who don't have a college degree but who grew up in high-income families. It's hard to call this a meritocracy when being well-educated is less helpful than being born rich. But even if you're born to a wealthy family, if your parents always told you things like, you idiot, you'll never amount to anything, you're less likely to be a go gutter than if they said, I believe in you and you can do whatever you put your mind to. There are also unearned advantages and disadvantages that people get based on their race, their gender, whether they have a disability, and so on. Now, I know straight cis able-bodied neurotypical white men who are poor and as any of them can tell you, these things are not enough to guarantee success, but they sure can help. All of this proves that if the poor had any ambition, they would have been born to a wealthy family. How typical of the poor to make such an irresponsible choice. Now, as I was saying a minute ago, there are grains of truth in the meritocracy myth and it is in fact true that with talent and hard work, you can make a real fortune for your boss and for the stockholders or whoever owns the company you work for. The capitalist class makes money simply by owning profitable assets. Many capitalists also work, but even if they stopped working, they would still make plenty of money simply by what they own. And for a successful capitalist, the vast majority of their money comes from owning, not working. Does that sound like merit to you? In a business, workers are hired to make products or provide services. Those products and services are sold for money and those workers get paid a wage. There are also other business expenses and whatever money is left after paying those expenses, the capitalists who own the business get to keep as profit. But profit can only be made when the capitalist gets more than they give and the worker gives more than they get. Karl Marx talked about this in his book, Capital Volume One. Capitalists make profit because the price they pay for labor is less than the value produced by labor. Or to put it bluntly, capitalists make money from other people's work. Some capitalists are in banking and finance. They make money by charging interest on loans, forcing people to pay back more money than they borrowed in the first place and taking your house and car if you're unable to pay. And then of course there are landlords who make money by charging rent on property, rent which over time can add up to more than it cost them to buy the property in the first place. Check out this photo. You might think it's a photo of leftist propaganda, but it's not. It's an ad, an ad that is bragging about the fact that landlords like all capitalists make money in their sleep simply by what they own. Does that sound like merit to you? This is no meritocracy, it's a kleptocracy. Okay, so I promised you that we'd be moving on to a more interesting discussion of the meritocracy issue and now that we're here, I feel like I've set the expectation just a little too high and it's now all downhill and disappointment from here. Though hopefully I've lowered your expectation back down enough to razzle and dazzle you with my brilliant, insightful analysis that I have absolutely and totally plagiarized from someone with far more intellectual merit than I, a man who never had to look the word merit up in the dictionary, the great anarchist theorist, Peter Kropotkin. That's how you know if a theorist has merit, if they don't have to look up the word merit. So the great meritocracy myth has been exposed. Our society does not live up to what it claims to be, it's not a meritocracy. A liberal looks at this situation and says, well then, this calls for drastic reform so that society can finally become a true meritocracy, but an anarchist like Peter Kropotkin says, meritocracy, no thanks, but lucky black cat. I hear you say somehow, even though you're very, very, very far away, are you saying that merit doesn't matter? So we should let anyone become a doctor, even if they're not qualified, we should let incompetent carpenters build our home so that the roofs collapse and are asleep and kill us. No, because meritocracy is not simply the idea that knowledge and ability are important for determining who does a particular profession. Meritocracy is primarily about justifying a vastly unequal distribution of economic resources. Why should people who are disadvantaged by either nature or misfortune be thrust into poverty and those blessed with greater talent and better luck be rewarded with wealth? This is degrading, it's insulting, it's cruel and it's unnecessary. All of us have merit, and by this I mean that all of us are deserving and worthy of the comforts and pleasures that this life has to offer. And furthermore, how can we measure one person's merit versus another person's merit when every achievement is not from the individual but from our collective efforts? Peter Kropotkin beautifully and passionately elaborates on this idea in his book, Conquest of Bread. In chapter one, he writes, for many thousand years mankind has cleared the land, dried the marshes, pierced the forests, made roads. It has been building, inventing, observing, reasoning. It has created a complex machinery, rested her secrets from nature. And finally, it has made a servant of steam. I'll just pause here to note that this book was published in 1892. So in the time since, we've obviously come a lot further than the steam engine, but you get the idea. Also, he uses some outdated language like the Orient and mankind, but again it was 1892. And the result is that now the child of the civilized man finds ready at its birth to his hand an immense capital accumulated by those who have gone before him. And this capital enables him to acquire nearly by his own labor combined with the labor of others, riches surpassing the dreams of the Orient, expressed in the fairy tales of the thousand and one nights. The soil is cleared to a great extent, fit for the reception of the best seeds, ready to make a rich return for the skill and labor spent upon it, a return more than sufficient for all the wants of humanity. The prodigies accomplished in industry are still more striking. With the cooperation of those intelligent beings, modern machines, themselves the fruit of three or four generations of inventors, mostly unknown. A hundred man manufacturer now, the stuff to clothe 10,000 persons for a period of two years. The soil, which bore formerly only a coarse vegetation is covered today with rich harvests. The rock walls and the valleys are laid out in terraces and covered with vines bearing golden fruits. The wild plants, which yielded not but acrid berries or un-eatable roots, have been transformed by generations of culture into succulent vegetables or trees covered with delicious fruits. Thousands of highways and railroads furrow the earth and pierce the mountains. Whole generations that lived and died in misery, oppressed and ill-treated by their masters and worn out by toil have handed on this immense inheritance to our century. So yeah, the fact that the world is covered in farms and factories and roads and train tracks and cities with electricity and plumbing and so on is something we just take for granted, or at least I do. I mean, maybe you're not as thoughtless as I am. No, who am I kidding? You're a trash too, just like me. Admit it. We don't really think about the incredible amount of work that it took to create this, multiple generations of hard labor and innovation. This is the immense inheritance that Kropotkin is talking about because we've inherited this societal wealth from the generations of workers that came before us. Whatever any individual achieves or accomplishes in their lifetime would not be possible without this inheritance, without the work of billions of people who came before us. This alone already shows that there's no such thing as individual achievement. Okay, let's hear more from Kropotkin's book. For thousands of years, millions of men have labored to clear the forests, to drain the marshes, and to open up highways by land and water. Every root of soil we cultivate in Europe has been watered by the sweat of several races of men. Every acre has its story of enforced labor, of intolerable toil, of the people's suffering. Every mile of railway, every yard of tunnel has received its share of human blood. Millions of human beings have labored to create this civilization on which we pride ourselves today. Other millions scattered through the globe labor to maintain it. Without them, nothing would be left in 50 years but ruins. This is another key point. The wealth of our global economy is not only a result of the labor of past generations, it's also the result of labor being done in the present, day after day, by people all around the world. Again, this shows that there's no such thing as individual achievement. This video you're watching now, I can't claim I made it by myself as much as I'd like to. I mean, who doesn't love taking credit for things they didn't do? But alas, I must admit the truth. I didn't build my camera. I didn't spend 14 hours a day assembling parts in a sweatshop. I didn't go deep down into a mine to extract the metals and minerals and raw materials that my camera is made of. I didn't invent the technology to create the camera. Or did I? Yeah. I didn't strain my back growing and harvesting the food that I ate to keep me alive while I made this video. Even the ideas in this video are not my own. I'm drawing from writing and research and philosophy done by others. I didn't contribute a single original thought to this whole video. And frankly, you should be glad about that. I don't have a lot of original thoughts, but when I do, I am doing you a favor by holding back. Trust me. Okay, back to Kropotkin. There is not even a thought or an invention which is not common property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors, no one and unknown, who have died in poverty, have cooperated in the invention of each of these machines which embody the genius of man. Thousands of writers, of poets, of scholars have labored to increase knowledge to dissipate error and to create that atmosphere of scientific thought without which the marvels of our century could never have appeared. And these thousands of philosophers, of poets, of scholars, of inventors have themselves been supported by the labor of past centuries. They have been upheld and nourished through life, both physically and mentally, by legions of workers and craftsmen of all sorts. Speaking of being upheld and nourished, it's a good time to point out a type of labor that Kropotkin forgot to mention, child care. Without this type of work, none of us would survive infancy and humanity would go extinct. So yeah, pretty important, but no shade, Kropotkin, let's quote some more of your breadbook. Every machine has had the same history, a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers who have added to the original invention these little nothings without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that, every new invention is a synthesis, the result of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry. Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle, all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present. By what right then, can anyone appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say this is mine, not yours? What Kropotkin has said here is like a big tidal wave sweeping away the moral and philosophical justification for meritocracy because as Kropotkin puts it in chapter three, how then shall we estimate the share of each in the riches which all contribute to a mass? The wealth and wonders that humanity produces is an achievement that belongs to humanity as a whole and so that achievement should be used to benefit humanity as a whole, spreading that benefit to each and every individual. Kropotkin does more than sweep away the false and flimsy justifications for meritocracy. His words also challenge some of the faulty justifications for capitalism, wage labor and private ownership of the means of production. To quote him once again. It has come about however, in the course of the ages traversed by the human race that all that enables man to produce and to increase his power of production has been seized by the few. The soil belongs to a minority. The mines also belong to the few. Machinery too has become the exclusive property of the few. The railways belong to a few shareholders. We can see now the injustice in this. Private ownership of the means of production means that a few individuals are claiming exclusive ownership to something that has been created by multiple generations, something that's been created by thousands or perhaps millions of people. And because knowledge and innovation and production itself is such an interactive process, every single achievement relies on countless others. Because of this, giving credit to millions of workers is vastly underestimating it when it comes to the means of production or any fraction of the wealth that exists on this planet. We actually owe the credit to the work of humanity as a whole. Humanity as a whole? No! The credit belongs to me and only me. For all the credit belongs to me. I am the God that shall take you to space through the strength of my genius alone. My spaceship shall be penis-shaped, making it inherently superior to yours. My penis shall be the God of outer space! The means of production being the collective work of humanity, the product should be the collective property of the human race. Individual appropriation is neither just nor serviceable. All belongs to all. All things are for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men have worked in the measure of their strength to produce them, and since it is not possible to evaluate everyone's part in the production of the world's wealth. All is for all. If the man and the woman bear their fair share of work, they have a right to their fair share of all that is produced by all, and that share is enough to secure them well-being. No more of such vague formulas as the right to work or to each the whole result of his labor. What we proclaim is the right to well-being. Well-being for all. You may notice here a similarity between the slogan, well-being for all, and the slogan from each according to their ability to each according to their needs. To each according to their need is about making sure that every single person has their needs met, and well-being for all is about making sure that every single person has the things they need for their own personal well-being. It's basically the same thing. Meritocracy is capitalism's version of utopia. Not everyone will make it, but anyone can. The rich deserve their riches, the poor deserve their poverty, and therefore everything is fair. What a twisted version of utopia. What a sad, unimaginative, pessimistic utopia. It is utopia for the elite, utopia for the few, a dystopic utopia. We can do so much better than meritocracy. We shouldn't have a society where we compete to get to the top. We should have a society where we cooperate to create a top-notch quality of life for all. A society where none of us is deprived, where we can all feast on the fine things life has to offer and spend our time doing the things we love to do. I'm not saying it will be easy to create a world like this, but the possibility is within our reach if only we can move beyond the capitalist system. When we do this, we can create a world where instead of maximizing private profit, our goal is to maximize well-being. Well-being for all. Hey, it's Lucky Black Cat. If you like video essays on politics, social issues, and social revolution, then be sure to subscribe and click the bell to turn on all notifications so you never miss another video. And if you'd like to help me and my channel, please click thumbs up and leave me a comment. Constructive criticism is always welcome. And if you want to watch more of my videos right now, you can click the ones you see on the screen. Thank you, and I wish you all the best. Remember kids, genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. I tried telling this to my Tinder date, but they were still disgusted by my BO. Some people just don't understand true genius.