There are two visions of Western society that are currently on the table.
Vision one: Merit wins. Being good at things actually matters.
This vision of society has excellent, positive externalities, because when you are good at things, you end up helping other people. You end up producing goods, products and services that are useful to others.
The meritocracy is the only system ever devised by man that actually creates positive effects for everyone else in a society.
That is vision number one.
Vision number two is the oversensitive Army of Losers society. Merit is discarded in favor of your level of being offended. The more of a failure you are, the more you get to be offended, and the more offended you are, the worse society is.
That’s because if the people who are unsuccessful get to run all of the levers of society, and part of what they get to do is declare that their un-success is a facet of their victimhood, that means negative externalities for everyone, because it’s literally the reverse of merit. It is failure of merit. It is lack of merit that now puts you high on the totem pole when it comes to this version of society.
This is the sort of conflict that is bubbling to the surface across Western civilization.
We’re going to have to choose which vision of society we wish to live in — the meritocracy or the Army of Losers society.
With regard to the meritocracy, the backlash has now begun against the Army of Losers society.
In excellent news, WRAL News reported:
UNC-Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees on Monday approved the transfer of $2.3 million in diversity and inclusion spending to public safety priorities in the 2024-25 budget. The trustees held a special meeting Monday morning. The board is scheduled to hold its regular meeting Wednesday and Thursday. The UNC System Board of Governors is expected to vote next week to eliminate diversity goals and jobs at member institutions, including UNC-Chapel Hill. A Board of Governors committee last month approved a complete rewrite of the system’s existing diversity, equity, and inclusion policy.
This is excellent. They are saying, “No longer are we going to craft all of our systems around the false, pernicious lie that all disparities are because of societal exploitation and discrimination. Instead, we’re going to do away with all of that, and we’re going to go straight back to the meritocracy. We’re not spending taxpayer money on it. We’re not spending tuition money on it. We’re done.”
That is the way that society needs to move if you wish to have a successful meritocracy, a successful society with excellent knock-on effects and an ability to build for the future.
WRAL added that one of the members of the Board of Trustees, David Boliek, said, “I think that DEI is divisive. I don’t think it’s productive. I don’t think it gives a return on investment to taxpayers and to the institution itself.” Boliek said that conversations about increased funding for public safety began after the on-campus shooting death of a professor at the beginning of the 2023-24 school year and were furthered by on-campus protests in support of Palestinians.
So they are moving all of their funding away from DEI and toward campus safety, which makes perfect sense.
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And the professoriate is upset. One associate professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Chair of the Faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill said, “Frankly, I was stunned. I have heard from faculty who are very concerned, who are concerned because they see the value in what we’re doing to increase equity and inclusion on campus”
Who cares what the professoriate has to say, considering they are the beneficiaries of a system that is directly cutting against meritocracy?
So path one for our societies is to stop this notion that freedom itself, freedom and economics, freedom and association, freedom of speech — that all of these things are tools of the powerful, designed in order to harm others, and that merit itself is somehow a bad thing and a demonstration of power dynamics in a Foucault deconstructionist way.
Then there’s path number two, currently being presented by Disney, which has decided they’re going to ax Tinker Bell from doing meet and greets at the park.
This story doesn’t seem particularly big on the surface except that the way that you educate your children matters an awful lot. The way that you deal with things like children’s entertainment matters because kids are incredibly impressionable, their brains are incredibly malleable and plastic.
And when you teach them that Tinker Bell cannot be allowed in public view because Tinker Bell represents some sort of exploitative vision of women, you’re creating a society of victims.
The predicate for this was something called the Stories Matter initiative over at Disney, which decided that Ursula the villainous sea witch from “The Little Mermaid” (who’s an octopus) was, because of her dark color palette, lavender skin and black legs, offensive in some sort of racial way.
Tinker Bell was also marked for caution. Why? Because she was “Body conscious and jealous of Peter Pan’s attention.”
Yes, that’s right: Tinker Bell is body-conscious and therefore she is no longer going to be included in the character meet and greets at Disney World.
Now let’s be real about the character of Tinker Bell. Obviously, Tinker Bell is in pretty good shape in the movie. The whole joke is that she is a pretty small person who’s in love with Peter. That’s the whole joke of the film. That is part of the relationship between them, which dates back to the original book by J.M. Barrie, but that can’t be included because it might give bad messages to little girls such as “being body-conscious actually matters with regard to mating.”
Or it might give off the impression that sometimes girls get jealous over guys, which you can’t have, because obviously it’s true.
These minor symptoms are indicative of broader cultural trends. And those broader cultural trends have an impact on politics because when you have the Army of Losers mentality versus the meritocracy, eventually the meritocracy is going to stand up and roar, because it turns out that the meritocracy is responsible for the success and health of any vital society.
The meritocracy is created by and benefits the lions of society, the strongest people when it comes to any merit-based activity. Those are the people who are the drivers of growth. They’re the people who are responsible for the tax revenue. They’re responsible for all the businesses being founded. They’re responsible for success in innovation.
The Army of Losers, by contrast, is a group of people who literally have taken themselves out of circulation because they were not meritorious enough.
Joe Biden has decided that he’s going to focus all of his attention on the supposed Army of Losers, and it is a disaster area for him. The only throughline to his administration is what he said it was: equity. Equity is the lie that all disparities are equivalent to discrimination, and therefore, if you can identify a group disparity in any practice across the United States, that means that some sort of exploitation or discrimination is happening that is correctable by government.
I don’t actually know if Joe Biden believes all of that. I think that Joe Biden is basically just a pinwheel of a human being who moves in whatever direction he thinks the winds are moving inside of his own party.
And the direction inside the Democratic Party is toward the anti-meritocracy.
And guess what? Most Americans like the meritocracy. Moderates, independents, even some moderate-leaning Democrats. It turns out that we like systems where effort is rewarded, where merit is rewarded, where innovation gets better because merit is rewarded, because the incentive structure is properly aligned for growth and health.
And this is why Joe Biden is collapsing in the polls.
