‘A Providentialism Without God’
1st January 2022
Because their status has been ratified by a supposedly objective standard, and because they think they’ve received what they truly deserve, the meritocratic elite is “no longer weakened by self-doubt and self-criticism.” Equating worth with credentialed intelligence, and convinced by the impeccable testing regimen of their own existential preeminence, they reckon that “their social inferiors are inferiors in other ways as well.” Dismissing the commoners as incorrigible rubes, they neither possess nor seek to cultivate “sympathy with the people whom they govern.” Hoarding their advantages for their children, the cognoscenti become as tenaciously entrenched as any earlier caste of patricians.
Welcome to the Crust.
Some of the “populist” movements of our day exhibit the morbid symptoms of a general crisis of meritocracy: Brexit, Trumpism, the gilets jaunes in France, irascible and deadly skepticism about scientific responses to the COVID pandemic, the metastasis of bizarre and grisly conspiracy theories such as QAnon.
Persons disquieted with meritocracy look for an alternative and inevitably gravitate toward socialism, which promises a solution in the form of universal equality and winds up delivering merely another corrupt hierarchy, this time with a stultifying sauce of ideology on top.
Bonus points: Count up how many times this article uses the term ‘capitalism’ incorrectly.