Leftism is a loser mentality. People endorse leftist ideology for one reason alone: they realize that they cannot compete fairly and openly, so they want to band together and rub the productive members of society of their wealth, income, and even status. They vilify even the merely comfortable middle class. Of course, there is also the rather bizarre milieu of the champagne socialists who resent the rich because they have more than them.
Unfortunately, leftism has taken deep roots in Western society. This is not a recent phenomenon. For well over half a century there has been a push towards lowering standards and increasing supposed “inclusivity” in education. Low-performing blacks and women are given scholarships whereas any white guy, even the most gifted one, would struggle to get any kind of financial support. After all, accordingly to leftist ideology, whites have been living high on the hog for millennia. Presumably, a struggling white guy does not deserve any help because there are some other white guys who have a modicum of wealth. Yet, the same scrutiny is never applied to a particular ethnic group that is heavily overrepresented among billionaires, millionaires, and white-collar criminals.
You can go through school and university without ever facing any real challenge, simply because the skill ceiling has been lowered so much that it is no longer possible to distinguish the gifted from the merely average. If some subjects still pose a problem, then there are alternatives. If some lefty wants to go to university but has problems with basic mathematics, he can enroll in a myriad of degrees in the humanities and social sciences. Even after university, people can avoid competition completely. Once they get into the NGO-industrial complex, thanks to leftists nepotism, they can coast for years. Other fields, like journalism, are not much better. These people write one article every few days, sometimes complete drivel, and cash a decent paycheck, albeit AI has made massive inroads into that line of work.
An interesting question is thus how leftist would react if they ever encountered a meritocratic system. They are naturally inclined to avoid these, after all. Thankfully, my real-life superpower is schizo-level thinking, so it took me just a few minutes to dig up an article that seemed to have been written just to give my intellect something more to chew on regarding the aforementioned question. The piece in question is absolutely marvelous: A leftist shitlib from the shitrag VICE writes about his attempt of joining the French Foreign Legion (FFL). I burst out laughing just reading the headline.
The setup of the article is that the guy is stuck in a dead-end job and hopes that his life will improve drastically if he joined the FFL, but this is not well specified. The reasoning is roughly that if he puts in a few years, he gets a French passport, and somehow this was supposed to improve his lot in life. In reality, the FFL seems to appeal primarily to people who do not have many other options left in life. If they get in, and serve for a certain amount of time, they walk away with a basic pension and a new identity. The FFL has probably provided a start for quite a criminals and fathers on the run from the divorce industry.
The article is quite thin on details and not a lot is happening. It mentions that every applicant had to do four pull-ups, as an initial check, just to quickly weed out those who are obviously unqualified. What follows is a multi-week selection procedure, involving physical exercises, medical exams, and psychometric tests. In the end, 36 of these guys pass all tests but there are only 18 spots. The author is not among that group. There is some whining that “our selection had nothing to do with our quantifiable performances throughout our various tests”, albeit this seems highly unlikely. Instead, all these tests most certainly had a cut-off. Anybody who did not meet that minimum was kicked out right away. However, in a meritocracy you do not advance simply by meeting the bar. Instead, spots are limited and go to the top performers.
Surely, all the tests applicants to the FFL go though are not just graded on a fail/pass metric, like a drug screen. Instead, they most certainly record actual performance metrics whenever possible and rank people accordingly. Surely, the people in charge rather take the guy who can do 10 pull-ups with good form instead of some guy who barely manages to do four. The other claims of the author about the people who got in, for instance his claim that the FFL wants to take people who are “desperate”, are also not convincing. You want to retain the healthiest and highest-performing applicants and not hand out spots based on some diversity metrics, albeit this is the reality in the rest of the Western world, at least for now.
The West is so far gone that we cannot even imagine what a world with a proper meritocratic system would even look like. Imagine taking tests that do not make concessions for women and minorities, for instance. You either meet the bar or you don’t, and if you have met the bar, you still have to be among the top performers. As a result, arguably top students would flock to very particular universities. Top companies would also look a bit different than today. Perhaps we could even do away with our monopolies and stop with the pretense that there is no government interference that guarantees their hefty profits, which, in turn, allows them to hire basically anyone, sometimes even the shockingly incompetent, because their position is so secure. This model works until it no longer does, as Boeing has recently learned.
A system like the one employed by the FFL could easily be applied to the rest of society. In fact, there are societies that do that. For instance, think of the national university entry examinations in China and Japan. In China, there are regional quotas, though, but it is still a very meritocratic system. Regional quotas cannot even remotely lead to the kind of distortions we see “affirmative action” cause in the West. Japan seems to not have cucked, despite decades of US occupation. They still do not care about admission quotas for women, for instance.
In the end, the only way any organization is able to remain competitive is by embracing meritocracy. If you do not let the best people advance, your organization will stop living up to its full potential. This applies to entire countries, too. Even Western industrial powerhouses turned into mere husks, unable to financially support leftist leeches who, over decades, engaged in a highly parasitic lifestyle. Surely, the malaise of the West could have been prevented had we put up some barriers instead of pulling them down so enthusiastically. Probably even a simple physical exam of asking people to do four pull-ups could have done wonders for our societies.