{"title":"What's wrong with 'meritocracy'?","description":"In this essay, I talk about the concept 'meritocracy', and why it's wrongly thought of as progressive, as it in practice serves to entrench class societal rule, and the oppression and exploitation of most of humanity (and the other animals)…
To illustrate how normal it is not to talk about this, I'd like to discuss Noam Chomsky's public statements, whose criticisms of contemporary society have otherwise been fairly incisive. Throughout his career, he has tried to get people to think about the influence and actions of the US empire and…
Everybody knows that human societies have long been organized hierarchically, and many people in fact believe that complex society requires this. Largely unknown however is the fact that there is a great deal of evidence that suggests that institutionalized hierarchy is very much a late-comer to hu…
Both David Harvey and Noam Chomsky have done a lot to analyze and explain the rise of neoliberalism. Both have pointed out that it should primarily be understood as a political project aimed at discouraging and disenfranchising 'ordinary' people, which gained steam shortly after the ‘social unrest’…
As Walter Wink has pointed out, violence is a tool that allows us to realize certain outcomes that seem desirable to us: to change either the person we inflict it on, or those around them, by 'making an example' of them. Resorting to violence as a matter of policy (as our current justice system doe…
Reintegrating the dismal science There are a number of ways to explain what money is, and what it allows us to do. Sadly, the "origin story" that we were all taught in school is a very misleading morality tale, in which exchange of goods is presented as a wholly separate sphere of life. Supposedly,…
One of the main reasons why I created this blog is in order to introduce people to, and explain the personal, cultural and institutional consequences of taking Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication (NVC) seriously. I was introduced to NVC a few years ago, shortly after I and my partner went…
Exploring 'meritocracy', both conceptually and in practice.
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