Dear Diary Moment 9/23/2019:
It started with this brain fart or what I refer to as a poetic flight:
“The so-called meritocracy is complete fucking nonsense!!! I mean how much harder is a Buffet or Gates working than, say, some mother or father working three jobs to take care of a sick child?”
And given the drive-by nature of it, mistakes were made. But at worst, I would consider it an informed blunder in that I still stand by it but have come to recognize (thanks to those who responded (and there were a few –hostile ones even (there were some blind spots in my thinking. But then that’s how we tweak and tighten our offerings and reasoning (our conceptual models), right?
The main plot twist came with the introduction of the issue of “value”. (Thanks Grady! Thanks Alex!) And at first I resisted it (rejected it even (as it suggested some kind of Libertarian/Robert Nozick nonsense. However, in my defense, the issue of value was presented to me as if value and merit were interchangeable.
But then I did as I always do and went to work that night, drove around, and thought about the relationship of the two terms. And I had to since a respected ally of mine, Alex, made this argument:
“D Edward Tarkington value has everything to do with it. Who deserves more if I spend the same amount of effort shitting into a hole as you do digging it out? Should we each be paid the same amount just because we put in the same effort? Or, does it matter what we’re doing with our effort, whether it’s directed towards the progress or detriment of clients or our societies?”
What I came to recognize was that there is a connection between merit and value to the extent that any effort must be working towards value in order to constitute merit. For instance, some people put a lot of effort into theft. But that would hardly constitute merit in most circles –even though it could constitute merit in a circle of thieves. Still, they are two distinct terms. And we can know this by the fact that value can exist without merit. For instance, a beautiful Midwestern girl takes a California vacation and, while walking down the beach in a bikini, gets discovered by an established photographer. He talks her into a 2 hour shoot and, before long, she is making way more money than the guy working 3 jobs in order to get his sick child healthcare. We can, of course, argue she has “value”. But we can hardly attribute merit to her since she hardly achieved her advantage through effort.
Furthermore, what we can assess from Alex’s and Grady’s argument is that what they mean by the term “value” is value to us as CONSUMERS, a very specific form of value. And, as we all know, there are way more criterion of “value” than that.
I stand by my original statement.