Will the Meritocratic Elite’s Mishandling of the Pandemic Prove its Undoing?
Sohrab Ahmari, a visiting fellow of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University, has written a fascinating article for the American Conservative exploring why our meritocratic overlords got the response to the pandemic so badly wrong in spite of their scientific and technological expertise. The answer, he says, can be found in The Rise of the Meritocracy, an extraordinarily prophetic dystopian satire written by my father in 1958 which anticipated many of the missteps made by the meritocratic elite over the last two years. Here are the first few paragraphs:
The COVID-19 pandemic is so complex, so vast in scale, that I doubt any single future historian will be able to tell a unified story about the crisis and the global response to it. And any journalist or scholar attempting a synthesis today will find his work hampered by the fog of war that clouds many aspects of a still-‘live’ world-historical event. Yet if there’s one central thematic thread deserving urgent attention, surely it’s the question of meritocracy.
To wit: How did the West’s meritocratic elites, with all their scientific-technological prowess, end up driving their societies into a ditch of distrust, rancor, and division? What led the meritocracy to badly overplay its hand on lockdowns, masking, social distancing and, above all, vaccine mandates, triggering explosive popular uprisings like the one in Canada? It won’t do for the meritocracy’s apologists to blame the unenlightened and irrational mass of people who refuse to comply with what’s good for them, which would amount to circular reasoning: The whole promise of meritocratic governance is that the ruling class’s sheer intelligence and ability can overcome the messy antagonisms of ‘ordinary’ politics – yet that, evidently, has not be the case.
Why?
We’d do well to turn to Michael Young, the British sociologist, Labour party peer, and author who coined the word ‘meritocracy’ in a dystopian novel first published in 1958. The novel, The Rise of the Meritocracy, proved enormously influential on our side of the pond, especially among such heterodox thinkers as Christopher Lasch and Michael Lind. And deservedly so, for Young masterfully grasped trends underway in his time and projected them into the future.
I made many of the same points, linking Trump’s victory and Brexit to the arrogance and hubris of the meritocratic elite, in a half-hour documentary for Radio 4 in 2017 that you can listen to here. And last year at the Lockdown Summit, too. If you click on the 6hr 3m mark, you’ll see me holding forth on the failures of our meritocratic overlords and worrying about the forthcoming populist revolt, with Will striking a more sober note at the end.
Sohrab’s piece is worth reading in full.
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Our Overlords are there on the basis of MERIT?
It’s pure rent-seeking and nepotism. They look down on those who work!
Ah, EDIT:
I see the point now. Toby’s father was very clear – he actually coined the word meritocracy (which, it seems, Tony Blair completely misused).
He predicted such a society would end up being ruled by those divorced from actual merit, a sort of echo chamber of those with “merit” assigned by other members of the club… that’s how I understand his message!
Quite — and that’s the problem. We can see the thrilled embrace of woke values and opinions as a badge of membership amongst Good People. It’s obviously getting impossible for anyone at the top table to state the bloody obvious like, “there are only two genders” without being cast down below the salt. When our self-selecting “betters” are so detached from pragmatism and the values of others, the murmurs of “let them eat cake” can be heard through the locked gates. It’s going to be a bumpy ride unless this changes soon.
Tumbrils rarely have suspension.
But, the end of the journey does.
And then, the endless fall into a bottomless pit… no suspension is required.
A blindingly obvious question.
I, too, wondered about the aptness of ‘meritocracy’.
Kleptocracy would seem more fitting.
It’s a meritocracy only if words have no meaning, it’s like describing the World’s Strongest Man final as a dwarfocracy.
You’re right to object to this absurd description, they’re there on everything but merit.
The meritocratic elite seem to have become puppets for a supranational corporate elite in this crisis. It was effectively a coup in which governments, having been hollowed out, infiltrated, bought and manipulated for decades finally signed away the last vestiges of their sovereignty and decision making to corporate power. The pandemic is deeply corporate in nature with its branding, superficiality and sales targets; its messaging has been as empty as advertising, its basis as shoddy as a crappy product launch. Meritocracy, with all its inherent flaws and class-based elitism, can now be regarded as the good old days, I think.
Plus, I’m not quite prepared to see the civil unrest outlined in this article as a misstep. I think this is a panicky attempt to rewrite the economic rules in a way they know will be painful and unrest has been expected and provoked from the start.
Now they pivot swiftly to war; when this is all over we’ll forget that it started with a virus.
Bingo. After the pseudopandemic, we are starting a pseudowar with Russia, and we will get hit by pseudocyber warfare which will accelerate the actual financial crisis leading to bank liquidity freezes.
Then we will absolutely have to have CBDC to keep our money “safe”.
All we need is a digital ID for everyone and we can save all the poor people who couldn’t access their money, can’t pay for their gas, petrol, food…..
Yes it’s all because the meritocratic elite are incompetent…
we can “save the poor” by squeezing the middle classes out of more of their earnings ,which will somehow end up in the rent-seeking establishment’s hands.
Aren’t many of the middle classes ‘rent-seekers’ themselves?
Quite so. Toby’s argument is completely wrong imo. They haven’t got it ‘so wrong’ it’s been by design. I enjoyed the ding dong with TY and Delingpole in the latest London’s Calling, James has got it so right and Toby just has no logical answer; time will tell.
Meanwhile the ‘Grand-Jury’ hearing continues at a pace and the pending, inevitable financial crash is explained in detail here;very sobering:
https://odysee.com/@GrandJury:f/Grand-Jury-Day-5-online_1:4
just for completeness:
https://grand-jury.net
It’s not a meritocracy, it’s nothing to do with the “axis of I.Q.”.
Unless you seriously believe Boris, or Trudeau, or any of the gaslighting, arrogent, would be totalitarian world leaders and their “yes men” really have higher I.Q. than your average member of the working class.
I.Q. is not a measure of Privilege, which is the real common denominator amongst them, that and their willingness to follow the Old Money funded organs of the would be slave masters of the world.
To add some explination after the edit timeout: Compare the 11+ which decides most working class childrens future, how many of the working class were prepared for the test at prep schools or with extra tuition? How many working class children of the 1970’s had parents with time or energy to give their kids extra tuition, or reading help? The test was thrust in front of me at age 10, the only preperation we’d had was a few lessons on verbal reasoning, amongst a class of 45 kids. Ridicuous questions along the lines of “you have 2 bananas and 3 oranges, how many apples did Jane eat”. Half my “Secondary Modern” school class could hardly read! It wasn’t until I did an I.Q. test as part of an application for an engineering apprenticship my fortunes changed. This was a series of time critical of tests that seemed designed to test how fast one could think logically e.g. a 3D drawing of cubes in a pile, we had to answer how many cubes were in the picture, ~50 in 3 mins. The examiner spent a lot of time explaning the test was not designed to be finished, I was half way… Read more »
Good points, especially about Kim Jong Johnson and Trudeau. Biden is another example, even before his dementia, his I.Q. was hardly brilliant.
And you’re right in your last paragraph, they’re aristocrats of pull.
I
I II – The Return
It doesn’t matter how clever the supposed meritocrats are.
The Superorganism, composed of freely interacting individuals and organizations, has an IQ in the thousands.
You simply have to look at the enormous variety of products and social roles etc which our society has developed, and which were not planned by anybody.
The USSR would have failed, even if every single apparatchik had been a genius.
Freedom is not only more pleasant. It is also more effective.
Or, as I like to put it, “Try putting an N95 on a lion.”
Correct, the USSR made economic calculation impossible.
I know this is personal to you Toby, but this is clearly not a meritocracy – it’s at best a nepotistic hell, at worst we have no idea who is actually moving the chess pieces around
I somehow thought the ‘meritocracy’ term was ironic, since the ‘meritocratic’ badge was self-awarded.
Somewhat like my thinking myself ‘logical’, despite losing multiple arguments with Mrs Dee.
”The COVID-19 pandemic is so complex, so vast in scale, that I doubt any single future historian will be able to tell a unified story about the crisis and the global response to it. “
Or maybe just get a copy of Iain Davis’ “Pseudopandemic”
That might clear things up for you.
That was my first thought too, but the pomposity of the main thrust of the piece triggered me to emphasise the privilage angle, so obviously completely unrecognisable by the author.
It was hardly complex, since supposedly democratic nations simply followed the example of the CCP, whether it made sense or not, and repeated the lockdowns whether they were effective or not.
There are some B.S. articles this morning!
”their scientific and technological expertise”. They don’t have any. They are in thrall of the ‘computer driven make believe worlds’ contained in ‘models’.
Anyone can sell them anything if its dressed up as ‘computer says so’.
Humanity is on the point of losing any anchor to reality, we are living in a computer generated simulation of our own creation. In this sort of ‘existence’ fear can be generated at the touch of a button.
And our ‘meritocratic’ leaders don’t have a clue how to question it.
I think the elite’s mishandling of the energy crisis will be what does it. People will not go along with freezing in the winter or enduring intermittent electricity supply simply because they have an obsession with wind turbines and solar panels and confronting Russia.
The only ‘energy crisis’ is the one they are manufacturing. Problem- Reaction – Solution.
The reaction will not be pretty because the solution will entail rolling back energy policy of decades. Biden had hoped to supply Europe with alternatives to Russian energy but he can’t because they don’t exist.
Beg to differ. They will sit in the cold and say thank you and then vote for the same people they have always voted for
Anyone below actually READ Toby’s father’s book?
Yes – a long time ago though.
Thank you, JeremyP99. You put me straight. I added an edit to my comment above.
I loath this form of pseudo-academic prose so rarely make the effort to engage but an opening remark did grab my attention, “The COVID-19 pandemic is so complex, so vast in scale…..” This alone shows how far the writer is disengaged from reality.
The only ‘pandemic’ we witnessed was a pandemic of lies, misinformation, statistical fraud and state-sponsored censorship of truth and facts.
In countries, mainly in Africa, that were not under the control of WEF globalists, things just carried on as normal – at least until their leaders were despatched and replaced by WEF puppets.
And would the writer care to explain how Klaus Schwab became UK Director of Economic policy, George Soros became UK Director of Social Policy, Bill Gates became UK Director of Health policy and Greta Thunberg became UK Director of Energy policy…..all on ‘merit’?
Thank you. TY’s obtuseness in this regard now is getting tedious.
Will he state that aggression with Russia was just poor judgment?
He is the perfect perennial conspiracy sceptic to aid normies in avoiding the terrifying truth, even as the conspiracy is the most probable explanation at this point (well along time ago actually).
Unless the DS changes tack, I would say its run its course.
There are plenty of issues out their that need a sceptical approach, but Toby wont go near them.
Not least is the total fraud that passes for ‘our history’.
This needs total re-evaluation.
Ive tried it here and have been met with censorship.
Censorship? Here?
I never this site would do that no matter how it has failed to address thoroughly the Globalist angle or the vax mortality issue. Can you elaborate?
I’ve had 3 posts censored on the forum, also the post asking moderators to investigate where they went, somebody read them and decided to censor them. Others have mentioned it too in private messages. It’s the reason I stopped posting there, that and the fact the forum troll is allowed to disrupt the threads and change name every 5 mins.
I’ve not had any comments on the main articles censored tho.
I see. It is odd seeing as TY is head of the Free Speech Union
Free speech must be as free as Voltaire described it. Otherwise it isn’t free.
Only one country, the USA, has ever gone for near-total free speech. The other 195 have never quite gone there. Funny, isn’t it.
England has such ridiculous libel laws that you can be successfully sued for telling the truth. It happened at least twice, to Private Eye and the Sunday Times.
Which libel cases were these?
Yes it was not that hard for Klaus, as he had been planning his world takeover for at least fifty years. By 2019 his acolytes were installed in powerful places across the “free” world. All that was then needed was a nifty little bio-engineered virus, not too dangerous of course, and a life ending “poison death shot”, both brought to us courtesy of the high IQs in Big Pharma, academia and government.
Sorry, what? Meritocratic overlords? Where? What planet have you been living on? There is nothing meritocratic about any of them. Labour is extremely concerned with the race and gender of their MPs. The Tories are busy propping up ideological cronies. What MERITOCRACY!? This is exactly like the whole fake argument against capitalism. Socialists are looking at the hellish landscape created by a bloated, corrupt government, far removed from anything resembling a free market, where the working class are being dragged down by taxation, and conclude: “Capitalism is bad!” Nevermind that what they’re seeing is not capitalism in the slightest. And then we spend half a century arguing like idiots what capitalism really is instead of giving people freedom. And the same is happening here. Someone looked out at the bloated, corrupt government and concluded somehow, despite the incompetence, that it is a meritocracy. If more people start doing this then we can probably expect that the next 50 years will be spent in fervent argument about what a meritocracy actually is instead of choosing the best person for the right job. All until the same bloated, corrupt government figure out a new way to enslave us all. For crying out… Read more »
The selection filter for the elite is more a high sociability and capacity for office politics than it is technical excellence. The disagreeable expert or man of real virtue has a problem, and it is he that is behind the wheel of the trucks. This situation will persist as long as cheap energy can be got with cheap debt.
The comparisons with Brexit and Trump are very real.
Just read the likes of Monibot in the Guardian, recently dismissing all the working class protestors in Canada as right wing thugs being funded by dark money from Russia (he offers zero proof of this btw).
These fucking idiots are so dim-witted that they claim on one side to be supporting the poor and working class while on the other, are happy to act as cheerleaders while the WEF-funded elite shit all over such groups.
It’s really interesting to see Toby’s ego play out throughout this saga. He thinks that because he went to Oxford, presumably by doing well in his exams and being Head Boy or in the school play, that it puts him in a ‘meritocratic elite’.
It was only a matter of time before that elite got all the goodies because they were just so good. Then the great unwashed would get angry and try to take it back off of them.
Sorry Tobes, our system has precious little to do with merit, nor does it reward those that display virtue or brilliance, outside a few exceptions. Our corporate system rewards compliance. Those that play the game and don’t ruffle any feathers. Our monetary system is based on debt, so whatever we’re flashing around now will eventually be rolled up and we’ll all own nothing and be happy. We’ve been kidding ourselves and it sounds like your lot have been kidded most of all.
meritocracy! lol
lockdown was forced by trouser moistening Art History graduate Dominic Cummings
there is barely a scientist in the house of commons.
these arent there by merit. they are greasy pole climbers.
Does merit include wisdom? No! Dear Mr. Young, Have you read the work of Mr. Henry George of late 19th century fame? Not just the political dynamite in his economic work. But also his work on how if the people have become corrupt the worst always rise to the top, the easily understood yet universally denied cause of the unjust distribution of wealth, and how civilisations may rise and fall. That is… Out of the open West came a young man of less than thirty to this great city of New York. He was small of stature and slight of build. His alma mater had been the forecastle and the printing-office. He was poor, unheralded, unknown. He came from a small city rising at the eastern golden portals of the country to set up here, for a struggling little newspaper there, a telegraphic news bureau, despite the opposition of the combined powerful press and telegraph monopolies. The struggle was too unequal. The young man was overborne by the monopolies and his little paper crushed. This man was Henry George and the time was 1869. But though defeated, Henry George was not vanquished. Out of this struggle had come a thing… Read more »
It’s not new or radical, it’s just suppressed as when you realise how, it makes a lot of sense and “merit” has nothing to do with it (apart from being good at making people ignorant). Henry George was a David Ricardoist (law of Rent), who was an Adam Smithist. Ground-rents are a still more proper subject of taxation than the rent of houses. A tax upon ground-rents would not raise the rents of houses. It would fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent, who acts always as a monopolist, and exacts the greatest rent which can be got for the use of his ground. More or less can be got for it according as the competitors happen to be richer or poorer, or can afford to gratify their fancy for a particular spot of ground at a greater or smaller expense. In every country the greatest number of rich competitors is in the capital, and it is there accordingly that the highest ground-rents are always to be found. As the wealth of those competitors would in no respect be increased by a tax upon ground-rents, they would not probably be disposed to pay more for the use of the… Read more »
“with all their scientific-technological prowess”
Prowess or lack thereof isn’t the fundamental issue. It’s honesty, integrity, checks and balances on power, protections for freedoms, incentive structures.
The circle-jerk backslapping of our supposedly meritocratic elites has proven that the higher people rise, the thinner the oxygen of common sense seems to be. Well-educated cretins like Chris Whitty prove, almost every time they open their mouths, that outside their own narrow fields of expertise they have no idea at all of how the world works and the people within it.
Example? The damage wrought via economic policies directed by models based upon the notion of Homo economicus, the ever-rational human who makes all financial decisions rationally and predictably. Comfortably well-off economists presume as they sit in their large, warm homes, that somebody with a depressing, minimum wage job will do their household accounts and pay the gas bill before even thinking of chocolate. Real people get their pay packet at the end of a hard, joyless week and blow half of it in the pub with their friends. And have a laugh while they’re doing it.
Our societies are in thrall to those who live and breathe spreadsheets but couldn’t change a car tyre.
I’m sure Whitty and Vallance and Van Tam know very well the damage they have caused. They just don’t care and are not incentivised to care.
How do I get the image of “circle-jerk backslapping” out of my head?
But yes. We can call it many things, but homo economicus or science or spreadsheetocracy or patriarchy – it’s deeply deeply anti-human and how strange it is that Francis Bacon of “make nature our slave” fame worked at exactly the same all-male institution as William Whewell who coined the word “scientist” and not so far along the road from where the insane Alan Turing would later work either.
You may have computational intelligence. You may have knowledge. But that does not mean you have the wisdom to use that knowledge wisely or with humanity. This to me has been one of the most alarming revelations; the sheer lack of humanity and misappropriation of knowledge. And for this alone those responsible must be held to account.
I dispute that the revelations since the end of 2019 indicate knowledge; to me “knowledge” includes the application of the ability to think, to have the “knowledge” of experience so when confronted with highly technical issues beyond your immediate personal experience, you can still apply critical and analytical processes to determine the worth or otherwise of what yo are being told/advised. Even if you get it “wrong at first”, that should not deter an ongoing reappraisal of the “data”, eg; SARS COV 2 etc. – to me this has never been apparent; Johnson acquiesced to SAGE et al at a critical moment and then realised over time he had been duped, badly so; he has just not been strong enough to admit this, and whilst his recent actions might show a resiling from this stance in March/April 2020, it is in no way a “mea culpa” in the manner of being “sincere according to truth” – and the PBI continue to pay the cost. Being held to account is essential: how it is to be done, especially with the war in Europe erupting, I am not optimistic in any way that is ever going to happen except in blogs such… Read more »
This reminds me of Emily Thornberry and her comment at some stage during the Brexit negotiations telling us it was time “to let the adults into the room”. I remember thinking at the time that this single smug statement told us everything we needed to know about her and her utterly mis-placed presumption of superiority.
My message to her, and the others who think of themselves as having that superior position in life’s intellectual hierarchy is this: If you think you’re the smartest person in the room – you probably aren’t.
Lady Nugee showed she was one of the UKLs biggest oikophobes with her comments about workers in white vans with football flags.
Actually – Brexit is a another classic example that merit doesn’t rule the roost!
Three letters;
WEF
Indeed. But Toby seems to think a plethora of world leaders enacting the exact same strategy and uttering the words “Build Back Better” in unison, is pure a coincidence born from “Higer I.Q”.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-davos-dictators-how-wef-clones-control-us-under-cover-of-covid/
Good question.
For my money it’s certainly taken the first step by exposing the MSM/Government/ Corporate Reset agenda to a much wider group of the public. Awareness is first base, and I watch (and pray for) Canada as the canary in the coal mine.
The General Strike there, together with resistance movements in Europe and the antipodes are building a head of steam too.
A lot of stuff is coded into that book, that Michael got from his mother who got it from her father. Twists were added to it over the generations, of course.
Asa Briggs knew about this but in his biography he merely hints at it.
What’s all this about then? Sauce?
The problem is that bureaucrats are dismal at picking winners of all kinds economic (marxism), IQ (meritocracy), genetic (eugenics).
When bureaucrats, not the people decide what is needed the result is always a dystopia.
When it’s rolled up with jobs for mates and becomes nepotistic the end is certainly close.
The UK government did pretty well from ~1950-80. One election slogan was ‘You’ve never had it so good’.
Thatcher made much of taming the unions but her main achievement was a corporate takover and the globalisation we have today … this accelerated after Communism collapsed, which was admittedly after her time. I think she commented though that her biggest achievement was New Labour.
Bosses now routinely earn 1,000x as much as their most junior employees.
Yes. Thatcher didn’t so much ‘tame the unions’ (always a diversion for the incompetent elite she served). Instead she (and her ilk) further empowered the global financial elite. Thus where we are now ….
The answer is no because the official mainstream view will be it wasn’t mishandled. Anyone thinking otherwise will be labeled as a racist right wing conspiracy theorist.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is so complex …”
No pandemic. Not that complex – just comprehensive.
… and certainly not driven by ‘meritocracy’, which is not the same as elite hierarchy. Countries vary in the precise nature their elites, but they have never been primarily meritocratic in Michael Young’s sense. Follow the money.
Look, it has been the most gigantic racket. People who identify too much by social class are not very good at seeing it – truckers are for instance.
The reality is that the majority of those who work their way to the top have not actually done anything, they have never lived or existed in the real world
What do I mean ‘do anything’. I mean for example they never had to graft to earn a living, never been up at 4am in the freezing rain waiting for a bus to work, never had blisters on their hands
A good example of this is the Dictator. Eton, University, writing for The Spectator. A sheltered and cossetted life. A man who fathered children with no thought of actually looking after them. or setting an example or guiding them. A man who ditched his wife when she had cancer
The exact opposite of these elites are the supermarket checkout workers (and others) who carried on regardless and quickly realised it was all bull. better one them runs the country
The technocratic overlords have not made mistakes.
They lied about a deadly disease and then rolled out a plan that has concentrated their power and secured them massive amounts of additional wealth.
They have been able to take a great leap forward in terms of the vaccine passport roll out, digital ID and soon digital only money.
In addition they have ascertained that 90%+ of the population will obey whatever order they are given no matter how dangerous or stupid it is.
I basically agree but hope and believe that your figure of 90% is too low.
Only they know how many they’ve jabbed. I believe they may be unpleasantly surprised at the level of resistance they have now met, together with the mrna jabs failing even with or because of the relatively benign omicron.
It would be interesting to know how many jabbed will never have another.
And all this is with them using the MSM et. as a propaganda machine.
I think they have underestimated the resistance – I certainly hope so.
And when the “vax side effects” continue and increase, even the dimmest sheep might wake up.
Maybe not…