Manning the Barricades at a Reasonable Hour

Meritocracy, in my opinion, is pretty overrated. The upside is obvious and repeated ad nauseam--anyone can be anything they want and rise as high as anyone else, with just a modicum of relevant talent and even more hard work. I used to think this was mostly propagandist bullshit until 2008 when we elected a black anti-religious Muslim-extremist Kenyan terrorist president. That wobbled my cynicism just a little. But not for long.

The formula of hard work + talent is a bit under-thought. Hard work is itself a talent, isn't it? I've been to chain restaurants and PTA board meetings, so I know first hand: not everyone can do it. Really we've privileged a small subset of the population based on a genetic quirk that makes them more likely to disregard the lure of YouTube clips of a cat fighting a beaver when there's work to be done. Yes, the congenitally focused tend to be on time and, when the rest of us do manage to show up to whatever it is we've been called to, they run rings around us by being "prepared" and "aware of the import of the moment" and "sober." This is not an objective way to determine the quality of a candidate or employee or potential romantic partner. This is genetic cheating. It's an unthinking privilege-by-predisposition mindset; a process not dissimilar to how we arrived at racism, the Hindu caste system or American social Darwinism. We as a society have set aside the best positions and the easiest paths to them to those who have, by a lucky accident, been born with the fluke of a sustainable attention span. The rest--the massive majority, by the way--are all left behind to eventually get around to struggling over the scraps.

Is that really all there is to it? Success I mean. Conscientious diligence, measurable execution and the spontaneous generation of output. If two of us are doing the same job and one guy puts in seventy hours per week, with tweezer-like attention to sand-grain-fine details and an inexhaustible aptitude for converting time available into work produced... fuck, what possible chance do I have in the face of that? Seventy hours? In one week? I can't even gin up the reserves to put in that kind of energy to something I like doing. How much historical dynasty management simulations can a guy play before even that has to be set aside for plugging names of albums I already own into Spotify because it's faster than finding the CDs? OK, it turns out it's a lot. And maybe without the distraction of kids or work, that could happen for seventy hours in a week, but because the society in which I was burdened to be born into only rewards us for the contributions we make to the common goal of wealth generation and productivity benefiting the economy as a whole,* I'm sitting here trying to think how I can justify the purchase of a toy-inspired video game in a non-birthday, non-holiday month while the doers among us are out there buying most of a county. This is a cruel system.

The obvious leveler in this game is reality television. It's been 400 years since the founding of Jamestown, the beginning of the must-work-for-food tyranny stigmatizing the daydreamers, and it's taken us this long to finally find a way to become so wealthy and powerful to afford to reward those who lack not only the talent for hard work, but any talent whatsoever. This is, in my opinion, a gross overcorrection of an obvious injustice, but at least it's a foothold. A beachhead. A place to push off from as we begin the assault against the elevated, fortified positions of Achievement and Discernible Worth.

But heartened though I may be, I know it will eventually come to nothing. We're talking about a social revolution of, by and for the work-shy and perennially distracted. If we're going to do it, it's going to have to happen before the new season of Wipeout starts.





---



*the whole thing smacks of communism.