Coitus Interruptus
'Meritocracy' was meant to be a dirty word.
Apparently, heroin is not a suitable candidate for a New Year’s resolution. One must choose a wellness-promoting activity. Amongst the lemon-clean throng of online self-improvers, plunging oneself into icy water at 4 a.m. promotes wellness. ‘My mental clarity is off the charts,’ claim the sadomasochists. Indeed—hypothermia will do that.
In this age of crisis, we seek purity and order. Veganism, carnivorism, astrology, ideology, clean-eating, hyper-scheduling, maximising this, cleansing that. I extend the same disregard toward such trends as other dictums, nostrums, certainties, received opinions, and conventional wisdom of other bankrupt ages. Certainty is for the dead.
After reading Confessions of an English Opium Eater, I thought floating on a manufactured cloud would promote wellness or at least pass this election year without a peep. Thomas de Quincey couldn’t speak highly enough of his magical little hobby. No such luck. Devotees tell me heroin has its downsides. Despite being delicious, budget-friendly, and resistant to inflationary headwinds, skag is remorselessly addictive, life-ruining, and dangerous.
“I’m sure you can handle another election year without turning to the smack,” said the enterprising merchant plying his trade in the alleyway behind Sports Direct. “Now fuck off before I wobble your head, you grass.”
Our unelected prime minister is dragging out his woeful 445 days in office toward an election in Autumn.
The choice lavished upon us is stark. It’s either the Conservatives’ sink-or-swim social Darwinism or Labour’s neurotic fixation with skin colours and sexual organs.
I’m unsure what’s worse: bankrupt yuppie blather or a predatory ‘hope and change’ enforced by legions of self-loathing, green-haired malcontents whose cherished beliefs shift weekly from revealed truth to damnable heresy.
Sunak’s getting antsy. The polls suggest he’s about as popular as a razor-sharp candiru parasite travelling down one’s urethra.
It’s going rather wrong for our boy wonder.
During an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, Sunak displayed the social subtlety of a dive-bar hand job.
I mean, he’s technically and physically on the screen. You can hear words leave his mouth as it opens and closes. But something is amiss.
‘Stick to the plan. We’ve turned a corner. Process. Going forward. Discipline. We are starting to deliver. Value for money. Taxpayers. Process. Scheme. Deliver. Rigorous scrutiny. Taxpayers’ money. Value. We will deliver. Stick to the plan.’
Sunak sounds like he’s being squeezed out of a tube.
He's not evil. He’s not a monster. But he’s installed with obsolete software suited to nineteen-eighties hardware. Sunak is the right man for the wrong century.
His tormentor, Laura Kuenssberg, has the frankness of a scalpel. She’s tired of this bullshit. The other 72 million on this island are tired of this bullshit.
Sunak had told The Telegraph he was ready to slash welfare to cut taxes. Kuenssberg presses him. He replies:
“I believe very strongly in hard work and in rewarding hard work.”
That’s a bit rich. This guy twice failed the interview and, thanks to knowing the right people, got the biggest job in the land anyway. He leads a country where hard work is famously unrewarded.
When compared to other European children, poor British kids are most likely to remain rooted in their rotting, poxed social housing estates and their pointless, exam-factory schools.
Their parents are often forced to collect welfare payments (the stingiest largesse in northern Europe, by the way) because their hard work goes unrewarded. Around forty percent of those ‘on benefits’ work for a living. Their paltry pay packets dissolve so rapidly they need handouts to stay afloat.
Perhaps Sunak has learned that hard work often goes unappreciated. In the real world, one can work one’s arse off for little more than disdain or derision.
He’s no slouch. Despite his intelligence and mulish British Indian work ethic, his premiership earns him little praise.
Last year, Sunak pledged to right all the wrongs. He’d halve inflation, grow the economy, slash the debt, snip the waiting lists, and stop the boats. He’s ticked off one of the five. Inflation has halved. Awkwardly, that has nothing to do with him. Pledging to half inflation around the time economists expected inflation to halve is like promising to deliver this year’s Spring no later than March 20. Vote for me!
Brits are not fooled. Fewer than one in four think Sunak deserves another stint in Number 10.
Sunak, the poster boy of meritocracy, mulches under the molars of that monstrous creed. The son of immigrant pharmacists, the wunderkind financier who amassed hundreds of millions of pounds, is failing for the first time in his forty-three years.
The problem with meritocracy lies in its brutalist logic. If your successes are all your own, then so too are your failures. By his own metrics, Sunak’s premiership is a litany of failures.
Few would argue against meritocracy. Ask the poet or the plumber, the neurosurgeon or nurse. All agree one’s talents should be one’s ticket, not the testicle around which one swam.
In his 1958 work, The Rise of the Meritocracy, the brilliant Michael Young illustrates a dystopia in which a pure meritocracy mutates into an aristocracy of the winners. Young agreed with the obvious justice in appointing the best for the job by merit alone. But he intended ‘meritocracy’ to carry a skunk-like stench.
Young warned that meritocracy could harden into a glorified caste system closed to all but the few at the top. He had a point.
According to the likes of Paul Krugman in the New York Times, today’s populist losers are revolting against the justified winners of meritocracy. Perhaps Krugman’s Nobel Prize fell off the shelf and bonked him on the noggin. The truth in his assertion escapes the microscope.
Those ‘losers’ have noticed our meritocracy is a glorified aristocracy, access to which requires not talent or ability but the parroting of smelly little orthodoxies and the right school tie.
They’ve noticed, too, that whoever they vote for, they get the same failed bullshit they’ve got since the 1990s. In Britain and America, we have two parties with not a cigarette paper between them. Until Trump came along, the winners governed for themselves alone. Only a fool or a Nobel Prize winner would pretend everything’s all right.
Our two-party system is a choice between syphilis and herpes. But there is hope. We, the disaffected, can weaponise mass apathy. Maybe, just maybe, we can force a stalemate—a hung parliament. From there, we can scrap our two-party system for proportional representation in which every vote counts. Under PR, we’d have new parties representing actual people's views. Never again would the choice be between two cheeks of the same arse.
Failing that, there’s always heroin.
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My first editor once remarked, "Isn't it a good thing we don't have a _real_ meritocracy?" He meant, of course, that if we had an honest-to-goodness meritocracy, most of the so-called elite would be consigned to mediocrity. He also meant the opportunity existed for mediocrities to shine now and again. You take the good, you take the bad, as the sages say.
Welcome back. Mr Gage! I missed the snark!
I’m optimistic that we are at the inflection point of the low ebb of cherishing mediocrity. There’s a rumble - your essay and comments as evidence. In the US, biggest challenge is teachers unions, in my opinion. But interestingly, the young parents I know are serious about educating, not indoctrinating, their children. Transparency is working!