Saturday morning, October 4th. Watching another round of "culture fit" discussions in hiring meetings, and realizing that our meritocracy isn't measuring merit—it's measuring conformity and then calling conformity merit.

The Circular Logic

We say we live in a meritocracy: people succeed based on their talent and hard work. The system rewards those who deserve reward. If you have merit, you rise. If you don't, you don't. Fair and simple.

But here's the problem: we determine who has merit by observing who succeeds. Success proves merit, and merit explains success. The logic is perfectly circular, and it makes any outcome appear justified.

The person who got the promotion must have merited it—they got it. The candidate who was hired must have been the best—they were chosen. The system selected them, so the system must have recognized their merit. And because the system is meritocratic, their success proves they deserved it.

This isn't meritocracy evaluating people fairly. It's ex post facto justification pretending to be evaluation.

What Meritocracy Actually Measures

Meritocracy doesn't measure abstract "merit." It measures fit with the system's criteria. And those criteria are never neutral—they're historical artifacts that reflect who designed the system and what they valued.

When tech companies say they hire "the best," they mean the best at things like whiteboard coding interviews, culture fit assessments, and communicating in ways that signal elite education. These might correlate with job performance. But they also correlate with class background, access to resources, and familiarity with the norms of the people already inside.

The system isn't measuring pure talent. It's measuring talent plus access plus conformity plus luck, then calling the combination "merit." And because the combination determines who succeeds, we point to the successful and say: see, they have merit, just look at their success.

Someone who would have been brilliant at the job but didn't go to the right school, doesn't speak the right language, or didn't know the right interview strategies never makes it through. But they're invisible—they never enter the data. So the system appears meritocratic while systematically filtering out entire categories of talent before they can prove themselves.

The Legitimation Function

Here's the uncomfortable part: meritocracy isn't primarily a system for finding talent. It's a system for legitimizing inequality.

If success is random, then inequality is illegitimate—it's just luck, and we should redistribute. If success is inherited, inequality is illegitimate—it's just class privilege, and we should equalize. But if success reflects merit, then inequality is not just acceptable but necessary and good. The successful earned their position. The unsuccessful simply didn't measure up.

This is extraordinarily useful if you're at the top of the hierarchy. Meritocracy tells you that your success proves your value, that you deserve your position, that any guilt you might feel about inequality is unwarranted because the system is fair. You won by the rules, and the rules are just.

But this comfort comes at a cost: it makes failure a moral judgment. If the system is fair and you didn't succeed, that's not bad luck or structural barriers—that's your failure. You lacked merit. You didn't work hard enough, weren't smart enough, didn't have what it takes.

Meritocracy doesn't just legitimize the success of the successful. It delegitimizes the dignity of everyone else.

The Conformity Trap

What gets called "merit" in practice is usually conformity: how well you match the templates of people who previously succeeded. The system doesn't reward pure talent—it rewards talent that presents itself in familiar, legible, comfortable ways.

The brilliant candidate who interviews poorly lacks "communication skills," which sounds like a legitimate criterion. But what we really mean is they don't communicate in the specific style that our specific organizational culture has decided signals competence. Someone who communicates brilliantly in a different style—more direct, more collaborative, more narrative—gets marked down not for lacking skill but for lacking conformity.

"Culture fit" is the clearest example. We tell ourselves we're assessing whether someone will work well with the team, which sounds reasonable. But in practice, culture fit means "reminds us of ourselves," which means hiring people with similar backgrounds, similar education, similar communication styles, similar worldviews.

Over time, this doesn't create diverse teams of high-merit individuals. It creates homogeneous teams of conformist individuals who all succeeded by fitting the same template. And because the system is labeled meritocratic, this homogeneity gets interpreted as evidence that merit just happens to correlate with similarity to the existing team.

The system selects for people who make the system comfortable, then calls that selection process "meritocracy."

The Feedback Loop

Once established, meritocratic systems become self-reinforcing. The people who succeeded under the current criteria get to set future criteria. They naturally (usually unconsciously) define merit as whatever correlates with what they had—the education, the background, the style, the approach.

Elite universities say they admit the most meritorious students. Then they define merit as high standardized test scores, impressive extracurriculars, compelling personal essays—all things that correlate heavily with family wealth and access to resources. Students from wealthy families score higher, get admitted, and then go on to define merit for the next generation using the same criteria that worked for them.

This isn't a conspiracy. It's genuinely what looks like merit from inside the system. The successful people see that high SAT scores correlated with success (their own), so they use SAT scores to predict future success. They don't see all the potential success that never made it through because it didn't have access to SAT prep or because it exhibited different forms of merit that the system doesn't measure.

The feedback loop makes the system increasingly efficient at reproducing itself while calling that reproduction "meritocracy."

The Alternative: Transparency About Criteria

The problem with meritocracy isn't that we use criteria—of course we need criteria for decisions about hiring, admissions, promotion. The problem is pretending those criteria measure objective merit when they actually measure fit with specific, historically contingent, frequently biased templates.

The alternative isn't to abandon standards. It's to be honest about what our standards actually measure and why we chose them.

Instead of saying "we hire the best," say "we hire people who perform well in technical interviews and match our communication culture, which we've found correlates with success in our specific context, though we acknowledge this might miss other forms of talent."

Instead of saying "we admit the most meritorious students," say "we admit students who performed well on standardized tests and had access to impressive extracurricular opportunities, which correlates with thriving in our academic culture, though we recognize this favors students from certain backgrounds."

This isn't abandoning quality. It's admitting that quality is multidimensional and our measurement is partial. It's acknowledging that our criteria reflect choices, not objective truth. It's accepting that people who don't meet our criteria might still have tremendous merit—just merit our system doesn't measure.

Being honest about this doesn't make the system arbitrary. It makes it honest about its arbitrariness. And that honesty creates space to question criteria, to experiment with alternatives, to recognize that "didn't fit our template" is not the same as "lacked merit."

The October 4th Recognition

Today, notice how "merit" functions in your evaluations. When you judge someone as high or low merit, what are you actually measuring? Is it pure talent, or is it talent filtered through specific criteria that favor specific backgrounds?

When you see success, resist the reflex to assume it proves merit. Ask: what criteria did this person meet, and who designed those criteria? When you see failure, resist the reflex to assume it proves lack of merit. Ask: what criteria did this person not meet, and what alternative forms of merit might they have that the system doesn't measure?

The goal isn't to stop making distinctions or abandon standards. It's to stop pretending our standards are objective measures of merit when they're actually contingent measures of fit.

Real meritocracy—if such a thing is possible—would require constantly questioning whether our criteria for merit are actually identifying what we care about, or just reproducing who we're comfortable with. It would require designing systems that actively resist becoming templates for conformity.

Most of all, it would require admitting that success proves someone met your criteria, not that your criteria captured merit. And that someone who didn't meet your criteria might still be exactly what you need—you just built a system that can't see them.

The merit myth tells you that success proves worth. The truth is simpler and harder: success proves success. Worth is something else entirely, and most of our systems aren't designed to find it.

The merit myth isn't that we should ignore quality or abandon standards—it's that we confuse specific, contingent criteria with objective measures of merit. Real meritocracy would require constantly questioning whether our criteria identify what we claim to value or just reproduce conformity with existing templates. The most meritorious systems aren't those that most confidently assert their fairness—they're those that most rigorously question their own criteria and most actively resist becoming self-replicating conformity engines. Before you conclude someone lacks merit, ask what your criteria actually measure and who designed them. The answer is usually: fit with whoever succeeded before, as evaluated by whoever succeeded before. That's not meritocracy. That's institutional reproduction with better branding.