XiphosAletheria t1_j10pmjq wrote on December 20, 2022 at 8:39 PM

Reply to comment by Meta_Digital in Anarchism at the End of the World: A defence of the instinct that won’t go away by Sventipluk

Why is it odd? Half of any group of a respresentative cross-section of humanity is going to be stupid. And to the extent that other traits follow a similar normal distribution, half will be lazy, emotionally unaware, criminally inclined, etc. It is precisely because people in general are not very good at self-governing that we need heirarchal systems that put those handful who are good at governing in charge. It would be odder to believe in heirarchal systems and to believe that everyone was equally good at self-governing.

Meta_Digital t1_j10sx4q wrote on December 20, 2022 at 9:00 PM

I feel like the article responds to this, but who are these people that are adapt at governing others and what system actually puts them in places of power? Looking at the world around me today, I see incompetence at the top just as much or more than at the bottom.

Also, not everyone has to be good at self-governing, but if you put one person in charge of everyone else, they certainly have to be good at it due to the complexity and the consequences. The argument that a single person should be in charge of an organization seems like the belief that the best brain cell should run the entire human body. Chomsky describes the consequences of this ideology as "institutional stupidity".

XiphosAletheria t1_j10w9vr wrote on December 20, 2022 at 9:22 PM

Ideally, of course, you'll have some sort of meritocracy, but any system that concentrates authority will work better than one that doesn't. And of course it won't be one person ruling really. You'll have the deep state, the bureaucracy full of thousands of civil servants, all screened through the need to get degrees and certifications, who do the heavy lifting.

And you're right! Things can go very wrong if the people at the top suck. Sure, of course. But a system where you have someone in charge coordinating a response to complex problems as they arise is still better than one where you have no one in charge hence no coordinated responses. The former may sometimes fail, even fail spectacularly, but at least it can sometimes succeed. The later can only fail, always and forever, until someone takes charge.

Meta_Digital t1_j10xjld wrote on December 20, 2022 at 9:31 PM

If anarchy is a fantasy, then meritocracy is a form of insanity. There has yet to be a good definition of merit, and worse, there's hardly ever been an attempt at one. Merit gets defined by the people at the top of the system in order to preserve their position and elevate those who help them preserve their position. And so, without fail, every meritocracy is a scam, and the result is that those with something approaching a more objective definition of merit are not elevated. We're not even at the point where we can even conceive of an objective definition of merit.

For instance, merit under capitalism is profit maximization. So those elevated to the top of society are the ones who... well by and large started at the top. Even if they didn't, it turns out that you can maximize profits best by being parasitic on society and the natural environment, and so those in the greatest position of power under capitalism are also those most responsible for the world's greatest problems. This is a pretty typical result in historical attempts at a kind of meritocracy.

A society focused on the worth and autonomy of an individual person wouldn't discriminate for or against them based on merit. Ultimately, merit is just reducing a person down to the instrumental use they have for someone else's ambitions.

XiphosAletheria t1_j11c4pv wrote on December 20, 2022 at 11:11 PM

Merit is simply effectiveness at whatever task you are doing. A janitor who is on the ball and keeps everything spic and span is a meritorious janitor. A doctor who repeatedly gets the best medical outcomes for his patients is a meritorious doctor. A CEO who maximizes profit and makes his company millions is a meritorious CEO. Some qualities tend to make people more meritorious across a wide variety of tasks - being conscientious, hard working, intelligent, etc., especially in combination. And I don't think it is particularly insane to want doctors who are good at doctoring, or politicians who are good at politics, or chefs who are good at cooking. It is probably impossible to have a pure meritocracy, given our tribal tendencies, but some systems are more meritocratic than others, and we should prefer those.

Meta_Digital t1_j11djdc wrote on December 20, 2022 at 11:21 PM

Okay, and I generally agree with this, but the issue seems to emerge when we're talking about organizing a society in a way that those with "merit" have undue power over those who supposedly don't.

Does Elon Musk have more merit than his Tesla or Twitter employees?

Does Joe Biden or Donald Trump have more merit than most of the US?

What even are the merits of Exxon? The Federal Reserve? The World Bank? The CIA? NATO? Do they have justification for the immense power they have over so many people's lives?

It's simple when we're talking about simple roles like a doctor or a janitor, but it gets far more complicated when we structure entire governments and massive national and transnational organizations around vague ideas of "merit". Can we even justify the existence of many of these organizations at all? What do we even mean by "merit" with reference to them?

Most of the discussion surrounding the failures of these organizations concerns the idea that the "wrong" people are at the top of them. If only Trump were president, then X would happen. If only Biden were president, then Y would happen. Yet the same system elevates both equally. Perhaps the fact that the wrong people keep getting into power comes down to the system simply working as it's supposed to work and that the ideas that went into the system are what's at fault. This would be the anarchist critique.

XiphosAletheria t1_j12npuo wrote on December 21, 2022 at 5:33 AM

I think the problems you are talking about are less system specific and more a matter of scale. We evolved to live in tribes of 150 or so people, and instead live in nations of millions, or in many cases, tens of millions or hundreds of millions. And at that scale any sociopolitical system is going to suffer from terrible distortions and breakdowns. The issue with Biden and Trump isn't that one is the right person and the other is wrong. It's that one is right for millions of people and wrong for millions more, and so is the other. And there are millions more for whom they are both wrong.

Likewise, people like Musk benefit from the fact that, at high enough scales, you can add a small amount of value to a large amount of things to make an awful lot of money. And money itself in large enough amounts can be used to generate more money simply by manipulating the system rather than through generating productive value.

But no system you design is going to avoid those sorts of problems at our current scale. Any system complex enough to handle things will also provide opportunities that those running it can exploit. And the very scale means you do need someone running things, because the alternative is anarchy in the sense it's detractors mean, violent chaos leading to endless warfare.