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posted by n1 on Saturday June 18 2016, @06:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the in-my-day-we-called-it-social-darwinism dept.

When Michael Young, a British sociologist, coined the term meritocracy in 1958, it was in a dystopian satire. At the time, the world he imagined, in which intelligence fully determined who thrived and who languished, was understood to be predatory, pathological, far-fetched.

Today, however, we’ve almost finished installing such a system, and we have embraced the idea of a meritocracy with few reservations, even treating it as virtuous. That can’t be right. Smart people should feel entitled to make the most of their gift. But they should not reshape society so as to instate giftedness as a universal yardstick of human worth.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 18 2016, @06:55AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 18 2016, @06:55AM (#362027)

    No matter the intelligence.
      Meritocracy may have made some gains but my own impression is that this still reigns supreme:
    "it's not what you know, it's who you know"

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 18 2016, @07:01AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 18 2016, @07:01AM (#362030)

    Damn it, I'm ugly and I know nobody. The only solution is a killing spree. Death to the beautiful well-connected people!

    • (Score: 2) by Webweasel on Saturday June 18 2016, @09:43AM

      by Webweasel (567) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 18 2016, @09:43AM (#362056) Homepage Journal

      Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

      --
      Priyom.org Number stations, Russian Military radio. "You are a bad, bad man. Do you have any other virtues?"-Runaway1956