It's still about the meritocracy

[phantom power]

...as emotionally compelling as many of the speeches were tonight, the key themes almost all centered around equal access to opportunity. Over and over again, the theme was that success should be available to those who work hard. Michelle Obama celebrated her father who went to work every day despite physically devastating illness just to pay for her college education, and even took out loans to make it happen. She said that it mattered less how much you made, and more how hard you worked.

And all I could do at certain points was sigh and shake my head.

No. As inspiring as I'm sure those points sound to most people, they're problematic. We shouldn't live in a society where a man with multiple sclerosis must work long hours just so that his bright young daughter can attend college. We should not be a society where long, hard work merely affords the opportunity at success. We shouldn't be a society that worships people who work 50-60 hours a week at the expense of leading a decent life with time to actually raise a family and develop pursuits and interests.

We need to be a society that does much more than provide equal access to our deeply unjust and flawed pseudo meritocratic system. We need to be a society that guarantees basic dignity for all people, a society that understands that luck is just as big a factor in most people's success as hard work, and a society that understands that there is more to human life than simply destroying one's life and soul to maximize some corporation's profits.

We can't expect our leaders to come out and say these things right now. That conversation must percolate upwards, at first from those who are considered "unserious" and have the opportunity to shift the Overton Window. But we do need to begin having the conversation that undermines the notion of the meritocracy itself. Big thanks are due to Chris Hayes for getting that conversation going.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/its-still-about-meritocracy-by.html

[niyad]

1. k and r and thank you

[limpyhobbler]

2. "We can't expect our leaders to come out and say these things right now."

They will never say these things until we demand them to say it.

Setting the bar a little low or what?
They could at least have had one person on the speaking schedule to say these things.

We should expect more from our "leaders".

[patrice]

3. We shouldn't expect our leaders to do anything that we are not pro-actively making manifest

amongst ourselves.

The definition of "merit" needs to be changed. We must change it ourselves, before we can expect anything from anyone else, let alone from our leaders.

What is the change that is needed in the notion of "merit"?

OP observes that a human life is worth more than what one master or another deigns to bestow upon it at whatever rate per hour.

How do we change deigning-to-bestow? How do we change whatever compensation is determined by whomever, into what we say we are worth? How do we change compensation into Real Value, for instance, rather than the phony arbitrary and ambiguous value completely defined by others known as money? If these are some of the elements to re-defining merit, what are the implications of that fact to, as in this example, a disabled person?

I suggest that if anyone lays claim to a right, for example the right to fundamental and unconditional respect for one's own human worth, that individual right is validated by recognizing it universally. How does that translate into social, economic, and hence political, functions?

How: If there is such a thing as a right to fundamental merit, it must apply to everyone, anything less than that means that it actually applies to no one.

This means that in one's struggle for recognition of one's merit, no matter what personal conditions that translates into, for example, in the case under consideration here, the condition of being MS disabled, but it could be ANY other condition, such as being LGBTQ, for example . . . that struggle should be implemented in such a way as to include ALL other conditions, or at least as many as authentically possible, that require amelioration in order for that right to human worth to manifest itself as an authentic right and NOT just another manifestation of privilege of one type or another.

IOW, disabled activism on the behalf of MS or whatever, should also be activism that recognizes the NECESSITY of free appropriate comprehensive valid and reliable education for the daughter of a crack addicted prostitute across the continent, or a starving teenage diamond miner in Africa, or the right of a student to a career field of their own authentic choosing, or of an elder not to be maintained in stasis until "it" is over . . . .

My point: If we really want to do something about merit, we NEED to stop separating out into isolated specialized advocacy groups that fight one another with zero sum thinking, and that refuse to extend the struggle to efforts with which one does not personally identify, rather than creating synergy.

Anything less than an effort for the intrinsic human merit of everyone is doomed to failure.