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[...] This is a insightful blog post, you can read more from the original site. [...]…

As for trying to create an utopian society by force, there’s a very good treatment of that in Bernard Weber’s novel _The Ants_. Each chapter starts with a (presumably real) case study of someone or other’s attempt to create an utopian society. Interestingly enough, all these attempts boiled down to the same scenario: gather up a few people, lock them up in an isolated compound and force them to live by an artificial set of rules with no grounding in reality. The result? A bloodshed in a few months at most. In. Every. Single. Case.

And how are you going to create a perfect society? Egalitarianism doesn’t work, simply because things aren’t equal, let alone people. And if there’s going to be an hierarchy, someone’s going to end up at the bottom… and they’re not going to like it at all, even if they fully deserve to be there. So no matter what you do, not everyone is going to get what they want. No matter how much there is of everything.

“Duke University actually trampled my faith in the meritocracy (…) I do not feel like a winner of meritocracy, (…) because no matter how hard I work at this University, there is always somebody more intelligent, someone that is able to work harder, someone that actually deserves to really succeed and perform more proficiently than me.”

Uh, no offence, but you seem to be describing a meritocracy that actually works. How did that trampled your faith in meritocracy? Because you’re not at the top? It sounds like what you don’t really believe in meritocracy in the first place, but just want to be at the top because… um, er… don’t we all?

Incidentally, we do have a world-wide meritocracy that actually works… mostly (with the problems mentioned in the interview, but hey, that’s the network effect for you). It’s the world of open source software development, and you know how much controversy it stirs. A lot of people *cough* managers *cough* marketers *cough* *cough* can’t seem to wrap their heads around an environment where there’s an objective, impossible-to-game measure of good work. That might explain why the society at large isn’t a meritocratic utopia yet: because people know that in such a society, if they ended up at the bottom, they couldn’t complain about it.

Cory’s pointing out the “tautological definition of merit in a meritocracy” was also enlightening. However, I would go a bit further; I wonder if we are truly winners of this system. I’m not trying to say I don’t think Duke is great, but I do wonder if it is that much better than any other school could have been for a lower price. We believe ourselves to be winners of this meritocratic system, but the definition of winning also seems tautological here: we believe we are winners here because we are told that getting into Duke means you are a winner, not necessarily because Duke is the best school (not that I am saying it isn’t).