Meritocracy

“The US is a meritocracy”, one of the most blatant lies ever told. There’s no benefit to working hard, only the people born into wealth (maybe by your father owning an emerald mine in Africa, but I don’t know) say this, either by blissful ignorance or out of pure malice. But one thing often overlooked is if meritocracy is actually a good governing system…

The dangers of meritocracy

Short answer: It’s terrible, you can go to the next chapter now.

Long answer: A persons prosperity under a meritocracy is based of two traits: “Hard work” and “Intelligence”. I will explain further later, but maybe you can determine if this is a good system or not based of this:

Hard work: Fail
Intelligence: Fail
Neither: Fail
Both: Succeed

Have you thought about your answer? Well, it’s… VERY BAD!

In-equal

We need to stop treating people differently based on how much they’ve contributed to a project (contributions = merit in this case). This is just straight up inequality and discourages newcomers as they’re treated much worse than the “devotees” of the pack. It’s almost like… A class system! This goes against the principles of Marxocracy, as not everyone is treated equally. FOSS-meritocracy leads to an eerily similar class-system as to our real-world, where the bourgeoise (devotees) are seen as “better” than the proletariat (newcomers).

Undemocratic

Meritocracy is largely undemocratic. What I mean by this is that the newcomers almost have no say in anything, while the devotees (or aristocrats in this situation) have all the say in the matter, leading to a largely undemocratic system with large “class divide.”, which also leads to a hierarchy (and hierarchies are… Bad!?).

Disorganized

It’s unclear who makes the rules in a meritocracy. Is it the lead developer, is it the people that have been contributing broken code (yet a lot of it) or is it the people that contribute less, yet better quality code? Even though I wish the 3rd group would be the one that controls the project (even though that is not optimal, as we should all lead the project together), it’s not! Yet it’s always unclear if the 1st or 2nd person/group controls the project. It’s incredible disorganized and I’m honestly shocked that it is such a popular way of governing. Even Godot (which we’ve already defined as an oligarchy, though) claims to be a meritocracy:

“But this is not all, Godot development is a true meritocracy. Code is only merged when deemed worthy by the other developers. Every change is discussed for pros and cons. This process is led by our large user community, who usually sets our priorities via issues (or just random rants on our community sites :P). This same community helps with the testing and works directly with developers implementing each feature to ensure it works as best as possible. Our process is truly community-driven from beginning to end.”

How meritocracies are formed

Meritocracies are often formed by well-meaning people that genuinely believe that meritocracy is a good governing system, while it’s not. I discourage you to harass anybody who owns or maintains a meritocratic project as they’re often well-meaning people who are simply misinformed (or maybe neoliberals but we shouldn’t harass them anyway [maybe]).

Republicans and meritocracies

We’ve already covered how there’s already a pretty big part of the FOSS community that are schizophrenic and don’t have a single good opinion. These people are called “Republicans” and are truly the worst of the worst of FOSS. Yet, these people – both in real-life and in FOSS – Believe that a meritocracy is only correct and is the correct way of running a FOSS-project. These people are very, very wrong and have as small of a brain as the chance of meritocracy succeeding. The people that say “The US is a meritocracy” though, I believe: Are nationalists in disguise so there’s no need to consider them.

Ending the meritocracy

“Well then, if meritocracies are so bad, then lets get rid of them!”, to that I answer: “Yes”. It’s a pretty good idea to end a meritocracy… But how? Depends on the group you’re trying to convert from meritocracy. Sometimes it’s as easy as just telling them “No meritocracy!” but it’s often more intricate than that. Don’t go as far as to harass people, but opening issues or making public announcements and calls to end the meritocracy often leads to democracy. This tends to be a bit harder than ending a democracy, though. It can still fall victim to the FOSS-corruption cycle with the exception of establishing a democracy, but that just leads to a worse system: Oligarchy. It’s next to impossible to recover from oligarchy as any forks or new projects will just go back into the FOSS-corruption cycle again and again and again! But as we discussed in “Democracy”, there is a way to escape from the hellhole of the FOSS-corruption cycle, that being: Stop accepting donations! Yet it tends to be a bit harder with these meritocrats. But if you’re able to reform the meritocracy turned oligarchy by destroying the oligarchy: Please push for democracy, for gods sake! We can collectively reform if we just accept change instead of staying with the old and usual. The key to change is – of course – to accept it.