The meritocracy story is elegant. Work hard, develop your skills, demonstrate your value, and the system will reward you accordingly. The cream rises. The best get ahead. If you succeeded, you were good enough. If you didn’t, you weren’t. No further questions needed.
It is also, on the evidence, largely false.
The research on what predicts career advancement consistently shows that the strongest predictors are not competence, effort, or talent. They are visibility, network position, confidence of presentation, and proximity to existing power. The people who rise do so not primarily because they are the best but because they are the most visible to the people who make promotion decisions. And visibility is not equally distributed.
The cream doesn’t rise. The cream gets recognised by people who look like cream.
The meritocracy myth serves a specific function. It is the ultimate protection narrative. It protects the powerful from accountability and the system from scrutiny. If success is earned, then the people at the top deserve to be there. If failure is earned, then the people at the bottom deserve to be there. The system itself is never the question. Only the individuals within it.
This makes the meritocracy story the foundational comfortable nonsense — the one that supports all the others. Take more risks? The meritocracy will reward your courage. Be more vulnerable? The meritocracy respects authenticity. Empower them? The meritocracy will identify the best regardless of who empowered them.
The 7% problem is relevant here. The behaviours that meritocracy rewards — self-promotion, direct communication, visible confidence, individual assertion — are the behaviours valued in 7% of the world’s cultures. The direct, low-context, individualist cultures of Northern Europe, North America, and Australia. In the 93% of relationship-based cultures where truth moves through indirection, status, and collective processing, those behaviours are not just uncommon. They are inappropriate.
Meritocracy does not select for the best. It selects for the culturally compatible. Everyone else gets filtered out and told they did not have what it takes.
The political dimension is now explicit. The meritocracy story has been weaponised to justify the rollback of every programme designed to address structural inequality. DEI is unnecessary because the cream rises. Social safety nets are counterproductive because they reward mediocrity. Workers’ rights are obstacles because the market should determine value.
This logic is internally consistent and empirically bankrupt. But its power does not come from evidence. It comes from its emotional appeal to the people who have already risen — who need to believe their success was earned rather than positioned, deserved rather than advantaged, inevitable rather than fortunate.
If outcomes are earned, the system is just. If the system is just, it does not need to change. If it does not need to change, the people at the top can stay there with a clear conscience. That is not a description of reality. It is a protection narrative for power. And it is the most comfortable nonsense of all.