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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 18 2016, @11:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 18 2016, @11:02PM (#362205)

    ust because someone is smarter shouldn't give them the right to control those who are less smart

    Kind of hard to do when the less smart are more susceptible to believe propaganda and the moderate-smart protect the media propaganda machine when it's favorable to them, and the most smart are seen as "crazy conspiracy theorists". Thus scaremongering easily leads the lesser smart down a road of belief designed to manufacture consent for violence. [youtube.com]

    It's like the Flouride debate. All the so-called "smarter" people call the smartest people idiots and conspiracy theorists for not wanting to drink 8 glasses of water a day with fluoride in it, even though the tubes of fluoridated toothpaste say to call poison control if you swallow more than a pea sized amount of the paste. Fluorosis, poisoning by fluoride, is a real thing that causes hardening of ligaments calcification of joints and destruction of teeth. [google.com] Fluoride is very hard to get rid of byproduct from manufacturing aluminum, and environmental groups prohibit it from being dumped into the environment so they sell it to people as "cavity fighting" when it's really a poison that causes arthritis-like symptoms and shouldn't be in our water.

    This is just one example why the smart people should be the ones that decide things for the simpletons. Problem is: All the uneducated idiots think they're smart and dismiss legitimate concerns of corruption as "tinfoil hat nutjob speak". They're the same unquestioning fools who always believe the "scientific consensus", even when the "consensus" is totally wrong and corrupt such as when most studies "proved" smoking tobacco didn't cause cancer... That conspiracy was upheld into the 90's due to the profit motive. There is a profit motive in pushing "fluoride = perfectly safe" propaganda too.

  • (Score: 2) by jdavidb on Saturday June 18 2016, @11:16PM

    by jdavidb (5690) on Saturday June 18 2016, @11:16PM (#362207) Homepage Journal

    Kind of hard to do when the less smart are more susceptible to believe propaganda

    The less smart shouldn't be permitted to control the smart, either.

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