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HamburgerToday's avatar

There's no trade-off between 'expertise' and 'loyalty to one's folk' because they are truly unrelated to one another. 'Expertise vs loyalty' is a false dichotomy created by the 'meritocrats' that reveals their true agenda: the denial of the value of loyalty to one's folk.

We cannot have 'dignity for all' without some deep agreement to be loyal to one another. In the end, I think, what frustrates and angers the 'less meritorious' within a 'meritricious' system is being treated as unworthy of any dignity at all.

Expertise without loyalty is simply genocide waiting to happen. And, given the birthrates across the 'meritocratic West', 'merit' is obviously working toward those ends.

Maybe the solution is to forbid experts from living among each other. That way their neighbors are the people they serve, not the people they're most like.

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James's avatar

Agreed. It’s useless to have a host of “highly capable people” all pursuing their own agendas.

You end up with warring factions tearing a country apart.

The exception, apparently, is Europeans—who aren’t permitted to operate in their own interests at all.

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Radovan's avatar

Excellent article. I always somehow leaned to value demonstrated effort more than achieved results, for some reason.

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James's avatar

Agreed. It’s better to have a committed partner than someone talented but disengaged and unreliable. Appreciate your comment—thanks for sharing. Planning to get a couple more articles out next week!

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MEL's avatar

The preface to "IQ Testing from a Racial and Typological Perspective" was written in 1930s Germany and has exactly the same thesis as this post, just with more emphasis on race. It seems meritocracy was an issue long before the term itself was invented, possibly as early as the late 1800s in the Western world.

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