The Loss of Meritocracy

Modern society has long been organized around the myth of meritocracy: the belief that talent, hard work, and training naturally produce success in the form of wealth, status, and power. This story presents existing hierarchies as fair. It claims that those who rise have earned their place through merit, while those who struggle have fallen short in effort, discipline, or ability. Yet the unraveling conditions of the present era of economic instability, ecological breakdown, institutional distrust, and widening inequality is quickly exposing reality. Meritocracy has never been a neutral system for recognizing human ability. It has been a narrowing mechanism that rewards conformity to particular forms of cognition, labor, and endurance while sidelining other forms of intelligence that are equally real and often more necessary for individual and system survival. Instead of viewing its weakening as a loss, a more strategic way to view it is as a necessity. Its loss allows us to more easily adapt to the change we face.

Meritocracy as a False Universal Measure

Meritocracy insists that human beings can be placed on one competitive plane and meaningfully compared through a common set of measures. Standardized tests, grades, credentials, workplace metrics, and prestige hierarchies all rest on the assumption that there is one central kind of intelligence and one proper mode of manifesting it. This assumption has never been philosophically or biologically logical. Every species has diversity. Homo Sapiens are no different. None of the species share identical cognitive styles, sensory thresholds, developmental patterns, energy levels, perceptual capacities, or adaptive strategies. They are heterogeneous beings whose capacities emerge uniquely to the individual depending on context, environment, and task structure.

To flatten those differences into one scale and call the result “fairness” is a gross conceptual error. It erases qualitative differences and replaces them with rank. Those who can be condition into the narrow metrics the system measures for are declared more capable, more deserving, and more legitimate, while the person whose abilities may provide more value but are unable to translate cleanly into what is measured is marked as deficient or lesser. In this way, meritocracy must first create a false comparable. It must reduce those who could not be conditioned so it can then rank.

Michael Young’s original use of the term “meritocracy” was satirical, a warning about a society that would justify domination through supposedly objective measures of intelligence and effort. Later political culture stripped the term of its critical edge and turned it into an ideal. That reversal now looks increasingly untenable. The claim that meritocracy replaced old aristocracies with fair competition obscured a more specific reality: it created new criteria for exclusion while preserving old protections for the elite. Competitive standards were applied most forcefully to those outside power, while those already positioned within elite networks continued to benefit from wealth, class status, social capital, educational grooming, and inherited advantage. Meritocracy simply took aristocratic structure and gave it new vocabulary to conceal and justify its use with the language of neutrality and individual achievement. It is therefore more accurate to say that meritocracy is designed to punish than flatten. It punishes by requiring human beings to translate themselves into binary, dissection-based processors. It punishes by forcing higher-dimensional forms of intelligence to operate with flat 2D outputs. It rewards self-compression to the lowest and narrowest band of cognitive functioning, while calling that discipline, character, and excellence.

The masses are told that the system values thought, creativity, care, perception, synthesis, and responsiveness to reality. In practice, meritocracy rewards only dissection as value. It punishes intelligence organized around connection, expansion, integration, and novel generation. When a person cannot thrive within this narrow and coercive standard, the system projects its own limitation onto the individual and calls that individual deficient in merit. Meritocracy therefore was never designed to create equality. It was designed to produce compliance by forcing human intelligence into its narrowest acceptable form.

Dissection Is The Issue

The root cause of systemic collapse is dissection. A meritocracy built on dissection-based growth. It measures for parts, ranks by fragments, extracts and controls through division. It treats this as intelligence. It is not. It is one narrow function of intelligence elevated above all others.

Every living organism, system, being, and community survive through connection. Intelligence itself survives through connection. But meritocracy rewards only what can be separated, isolated, counted, and compared. It pays for division and calls that value. When the living whole begins to fail under that pressure, the system names the result “complexity,” as if collapse were a mystery. The answer to the mystery is as simple as the 2D system itself. Endless dissection will always lead to death.

Meritocracy cannot value connection or creation. To create a hierarchy, the system can only value the ability to control, fragment, and extract from those who sustain what creates and sustains life. Connection and labor are positioned as lower forms precisely so they can be devalued, dissected, and captured by institutional gatekeepers. The people most capable of generating relation, coherence, and novelty are increasingly pathologized with each generation of professional dissection. The system professionals are reduced to dissection only cognition by their institutional education and training. Until they see those who keep their whole intelligence as irrational, excessive, unstable, or disabled—because a narcissistic hierarchy cannot survive if those who sustain life are allowed to define value. It survives by subordinating connection, appropriating creation, and redirecting their value upward

Humanity’s Whole Intelligence

Human intelligence is larger than just dissection. It includes the ability to connect, to sense, to synthesize, to respond to living context, and to generate novel using dissection and connection discerningly. A society organized only around dissection trains people away from reality. It teaches them to break apart what they depend on, then forces them to perform as if it still feels alive, coherent, or sustainable.

Meritocracy’s claim that connection, expansion, and novel generation are hard to measure, while dissection is universal is simply not true. Every system built on dissection cannot recognize their value without exposing its own limits. So it pushes them downward, underpays them, creates policy that misreads them, and often punishes them outright. What cannot be easily divided is treated as if it is frivolous and childlike. What cannot be reduced is treated as if it is broken.

Collapse is Not Due to Complexity

Each dissection-based system uses language complexity to hide the actual damage. As a living system is cut apart and those parts stack up, it creates vocabulary to define and describe the new parts made as complexity. When instability and disorder eventually arise from all those parts they point to all the new vocabulary as a justification that it was complexity. But most of that complexity is simply the result of dissection. It is what causes the inevitable failure that follows when relation has divided to allow for extraction.

If society is understood as a living weave of relationships, then dissection is like taking a ball of yarn and reducing it to a pile of cut strands. The system does not reward what sustains life. It rewards what sustains itself. It pays for whatever feeds its structure, regardless of the cost to society or to living systems. Dissection is rewarded because it allows living processes to be converted into consumable value for the system. Connection and creation are devalued because the system exists to feed on them. As the system grows, its hunger grows with it, drawing living beings into closer dependence while extracting more with less regard for their well-being. Once the whole has been consumed past its capacity to hold, breakdown follows. The unraveling is then treated as an external crisis, when in fact the method itself produced it.

This is why the loss of meritocracy should be celebrated. It weakens a system that confuses division with intelligence and control with value. It creates the possibility of returning to forms of intelligence that can cultivate life: connection, sensitivity, flexibility, synthesis, and adaptive freedom.

We cannot survive great change by becoming more dissected. We survive by becoming more connected. Our biology cannot change fast enough on its own. Intelligence bridges that gap. But only if intelligence is valued for functioning with the proper balance of connection, integration, creation and dissection. Any system that rewards only dissection will face collapse faster as stability decreases and change increases.

Freedom To Adapt

Human biology does not transform at the speed of institutional or planetary change. Our bodies, nervous systems, sensory thresholds, and cognitive tendencies do not quickly redesign to suit changing conditions. What humanity’s central advantage has always been intelligence that is curiosity driven, flexible in focus, internal-external based in thinking and creative in design. Using tools, language, social organization, imagination, and design to modify our environments in ways our biology alone cannot accomplish quickly enough.

In order to adapt, we have to repair what meritocracy has damaged. Meritocracy trains people for obedience inside fixed containers. But the world we are entering is not stable enough for that model. Climate disruption is pushing human systems toward extremes of heat, flood, drought, fire, displacement, and breakdown. In those conditions, narrow performance intelligence is not enough. Dissection cannot keep people alive when what is failing is the living web itself. A system trained to cut, rank, isolate, and comply is the worst possible form of adaptation for an age defined by ecological stress.

No amount of hard work in the approved form will save us. Meritocracy confuses obedience with intelligence and stamina driven narrowing as development. But a system built on extraction and dissection cannot guide survival in an age that demands connection, flexibility, and adaptive intelligence.

We must let go of meritocracy’s false measure and create a different basis of value. One that recognizes intelligence as plural, adaptation as relational, and pivot to work that sustains life. From here, we must value those who can help us heal to the whole intelligence we need to survive.

Creating What Come Next

What is needed now is a fuller account of value and a serious commitment to cultivating humanity’s whole intelligence. Human development cannot be reduced to the narrow cognitive functions that bureaucratic systems can most easily measure and rank. It must also include sensitivity, connection, creativity, perception, and the capacity to respond to living reality. Under conditions of accelerating instability, these are the adaptive capacities on which survival may increasingly depend.

This conviction grounds the work we undertake at the Creative Intelligence Institute. For the past six years, I have been engaged in the deliberate understanding of how our full intelligence functions. Particularly I have focused on the forms of intelligence that the system tried to punish, diminish, or condition out of people but could not fully erase. My focus is on connecting with those who knew all along that something fundamental was wrong. I am looking for those whose whole intelligence was treated as excess, instability, disability, or threat because it could not be reduced to narrow cognitive, performative, or bureaucratic terms. I am seeking fellow carriers of capacities that may now be necessary. If those capacities endured through the violence of the system, then their endurance itself has meaning. Now we must understand the meaning as fully as possible, to protect what remains alive in it, and to pass it on.

We cannot reverse the damage already done to the world. What remains possible is to prepare for what comes next by preserving the full intelligence of the young and old who can still perceive, connect, adapt, and help reorganize life under pressure. We have already begun this work, and it is beautiful. By honoring our natural way of being our intelligence grows with connection. It expands and heals as a part of the same function. It dissects only a function of discernment so we can make sure what we create is what will serve us until the end.

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