How You Know You're Living in a Broken System

Meritocracy as a form of hazing

Inspiration comes from strange places. I recently came across a Substack essay that, even though it's superficially about something totally uninteresting and orthogonal to my interests, indirectly addresses a topic that's absolutely central to my writing and worldview.

The piece is by R Meager, and it's one of those friendly and approachable online posts that sets out to peddle helpful life advice. I hate that kind of thing.

Unlike most such posts, however, this one actually dispenses useful life advice. In fact, it may even contain the One Weird Trick that's the Key to Success in Modern Society.

In describing this trick, however, it inadvertently illustrates the ways in which our current society is evil, broken, and doomed.

Meager, like most good writers, presents his advice in the form of a story. I'm not a good writer, so I'll do my best to paraphrase his main idea, which goes something like this:

We live in a meritocracy. Most people think meritocracy is a system that selects for people who do a specific thing well—like, say, writing academic papers. Other people think meritocracy is a sham and only selects people who have some preexisting advantage. The truth is that meritocracy favors people who do a general thing well: that people are good at coping with rejection.

The point Meager keeps coming back to is that, whatever you happen to be doing with your life, you have to actually finish and submit your work. Seriously. This may seem obvious, he says, but most people can't work up the will to accomplish even this basic task. So if you do manage to clear this early hurdle, you'll be way ahead of the competition.

Which is empowering, right? That's all it takes! Anyone can muster the will to do that! So what are you waiting for, chump? Get out there!

Meager is writing about the academic job market, but it's obvious his thesis applies to all kinds of tasks and rites of passage. If you don’t apply to jobs, you won't get jobs. If you don't audition for roles, you won't get roles. If you don't go on dates, you won't find love. If you don't hound your insurance company, you won't get your claims processed. If you don't apply for grants, you won't get funding. And so on.

In Meager's telling, most people simply cannot do this, and this is the main reason some people succeed and some don't. Or, as he puts it, the act of striving itself—mustering the will to risk rejection—is the "sieve" that separates winners from losers. Not selection criteria. Not professional judgment. Not connections. Not worth or intelligence or ability. Just gumption.

I don't know how true this is. It's obviously partly true, and almost certainly not wholly true. I.e., mustering the will to risk rejection will put you ahead of a big chunk of your competition, but certainly won't put you ahead of all the competition.

What worries me is that Meager's thesis might be mostly true—that we might have reached a point where risking rejection is the decisive factor in determining who succeeds. That would be a very bad sign, I think, for the health of our meritocracy.

Let's take a moment to consider how things are supposed to work. There are two broadly familiar ways to select people for jobs, leadership roles, professional positions, and so on. One is to pick people who come personally recommended, give them the post, then train them to perform its duties. That's the bad old way we're supposed to deplore. Another way is to give people a test of ability, pick the people who do the best, and hope things work out at a personal level. That's our current system, in theory. That's meritocracy.

What Meager is describing is a different process, one where you subject people to some generally unpleasant experience, and those who prove most willing or able to endure it are those who get picked for key positions. For example, you might force applicants to undergo a humiliating and demoralizing ritual, then pick the people who don't bail out.

The way Meager tells it, this is essentially what's happening. We think people are applying for jobs, submitting papers, filing applications, asking folks out, recording demos, posting videos, etc., and that those with the best chops are the ones who win out. What's actually happening is that the process of doing all this stuff is so stressful, so emotionally taxing, so psychologically painful at a fundamental level, that most people simply don't do it at all, or don't do it anywhere near enough. They might be perfectly nice, capable people. But they don't have the guts to complete.

Meager spends some time exploring the reasons for this reluctance. Are people are shy? Are they resentful? Demoralized? Bored by the hassle? Are they afraid of being judged? What seems undeniable is that many people hate rejection so much they'd rather not risk it at all. In a selection process where the risk of rejection is high, huge numbers of people end up dropping out. So what's being selected for, in the system Meager describes, is the capacity to endure high levels of a particular kind of psychological pain.

Let's be clear. The word for this is hazing. It may not look like hazing. We may not like to call it hazing. But that's the process Meager is describing.

Now, there are times and places for hazing. As a membership requirement, it tends to form tight-knit groups, because people who go through a hazing process have a shared, intense experience to look back on and feel like members of an exclusive club. It also serves as a meaningful entry requirement for organizations where discipline is a paramount virtue, like armies and sports teams. Finally, it can be used to select for candidates who are highly motivated to enter a particular position.

But hazing is not how our current system is supposed to operate. It may be an unavoidable component of any meritocratic system, and indeed of any selection process. But it's not, in most cases, supposed to be the decisive component. And there are good reasons for that.

One is that hazing, in many cases, selects for the wrong kinds of traits. Let's say you're hiring doctors for a hospital. You want a team of motivated, disciplined, tight-knit recruits, so you subject candidates to a humiliating ordeal. Maybe you put them through a grueling application process that makes them feel worthless and inadequate. If all goes well, a few hardy souls will stick it out, and you'll end up with a team of people who very badly want to be doctors at your hospital, who have the guts to endure stressful experiences, and who feel like they've earned their coveted posts and belong to a tight-knit, exclusive club. Great! The trouble is, there's no guarantee these people will actually be good doctors! Maybe you should have looked for people who knew a lot about medicine, instead.

A related trouble is that hazing, like many other recruitment methods, can suffer from the Matthew effect, the tendency for fortunate people to accumulate advantages. I've noticed that people from stable, happy, upper-class families seem much better able to weather rejection than people who've been kicked around their whole lives. Which makes sense, right? People from hard-luck backgrounds can get trapped in a cycle of recrimination and resentment: every new rejection reinforces their darkest fears.

A bigger trouble with hazing is that it's, well, cruel. I don't think many people intend for our current system to be psychologically abusive. In practice, though, modern society seems to make many people feel so dehumanized and unwanted—so crushed by rejection—that they're barely even able to leave the house. Maybe they shouldn't take things so personally! Probably not, but that doesn't change the fact that people do take things personally. If anything, constant exhortations to toughen up and get back on the horse can end up adding to their humiliation. We force people to undergo rejection until they feel like unwanted losers, then we berate them for having a bad attitude. Seems unhealthy!

The biggest problem with hazing as a selection process, though, is that it breaks down in the face of intense competition. Suppose you have thousands of candidates for a position. If you're using meritocratic methods, selection is easy: you develop a formula that looks at grades and tests and picks the highest scorers. If you're using personal methods, your task is even easier: you just ask friends and colleagues for recommendations and ignore the other applicants.

If you're using the hazing method, though, you have to make your selection process grueling enough to weed out hundreds and hundreds of people. And what happens if those people have been reading life advice from R Meager, which tells then, "Listen, enduring rejection is the key to success in the modern world; no matter what happens, you've gotta stick with it!" Well, then, those people will all keep pushing to be included, and you'll need a selection process that's even more grueling. And what happens if those people read even more life advice that tells them, "Listen, I mean it, only losers quit the game, get out there, flood the zone, never say never, stay positive at all costs, take drugs, get therapy, do whatever it takes, persistence is key, strive until you die!" Now you've made the process so grueling that significant numbers of people are cracking under the pressure. But there's still a huge mass who keep striving, keep pushing, keep pursuing their dreams at all costs. So you've got to turn the heat up even higher …

What I think has happened is something like this. People feel uneasy about pure meritocracy. It feels too cold. Too calculating and inhuman. Too numbers-driven. Too reductive. People want to distribute social rewards based on something other than raw metrics of ability. So people will only tolerate meritocracy if it comes leavened with some other, more personal selection process.

The obvious candidate is interpersonal connections. But people feel uncomfortable with raw nepotism, too. It feels unfair. Old-fashioned. Even reactionary. It's not the American way.

What we've ended up, then, is a hybrid system where coveted jobs and roles and perks and titles are still, in theory, available to anyone—still allotted, in part, according to some unknowable X-factor that isn't strictly meritocratic, but isn't obviously nepotistic, either. If recruiters are hiring for a job, they might consider personal recommendations, they might look at a candidate's credentials and experience and so on, but they'll also want to schedule interviews and evaluate "interpersonal skills." If a young woman's looking for people to date, she might ask her friends for recommendations, she might consider things like income and attractiveness, but she'll also feel a need to go on dates and weed out guys who give her "the ick" or don’t have the right kind of chemistry. If a talent agent is scouting around for new artists, they'll give a leg up to well-connected aspirants, they'll give some weight to the work itself, but they'll also be looking for candidates who have the right "vibe" or je ne sais quoi or seem plugged into the zeitgeist or who feel like the next big thing.

The door is still open! It's not a closed system. There's still room for discovery. For serendipity. For adventure, for exploration, for unexpected inspiration. For that magical, out-of-blue chance connection that reminds you why you got into this racket in the first place and makes you feel like it's all worthwhile.

Unfortunately, the internet has brought us to a place where there are too many candidates for this to work. The door has been left open for that one quirky random person you didn't even know you were hoping to find, but online systems make it so easy to connect that there are now thousands of quirky random people all trying to barge their way through. Sheer numbers have created a situation where different selection pressures kick in—where rejection is so necessary, so widespread, so constant, that the only people who stay in the game are those with a superhuman ability (there's no polite way to put this) to eat shit. To get up and be rejected all day, every day, and keep coming back to be rejected some more.

This approach simply isn't sustainable. It's bound to collapse some day.

Maybe (gulp) it already has.