Meritocracy without the Mirror (Part 1)

The idea of meritocracy says that in order for people to advance in institutional and social life, they should earn that privilege through applying their means of contribution in the domain that they inhabit. The benefits that accrue from this system include having the best and most qualified people in roles that meet their standard of competence, the building of character in the journey of becoming a person who deserves the success they achieve, and the pushing back of our limits of human potential as people strive (and are incentivised by this system) to become all that they can be. In this way of thinking about how we organise our institutions, there is no room for nepotism, tokenism or flawed attempts at ensuring equity such as ‘equality of outcome’ initiatives.

Despite the clear progress that such a system enables, in the age of entitlement that we live in, the idea of meritocracy has become unpopular. The argument against it goes along the lines that it is in effect a façade beneath which structural and other societal barriers exist that prevent individuals from advancing in the way that equality would demand. In some ways I am empathetic to this view. In the world of work, there are no doubt institutions that are run dysfunctionally to limit opportunities for a range of people who would otherwise be qualified for roles or deserving of an opportunity based on some other qualities that they possess. In some of these organisations, what is playing out is a mirror-tocracy. So what do I mean by that term?

In a mirror-tocracy, the people who get ahead are not those who work the hardest or care most about the clientele they serve. Instead, those that advance are individuals who most remind the leaders and decision makers of themselves. In this ego driven system of promotion and succession, those who are selected for greater opportunity share at least one, and often many, of the identity markers which characterise those who are in charge. Among these identity categories are gender, race, political affiliation, religious beliefs, educational lineage, membership to other elite institutions, or more broadly, social class. In the legal field in which I work, it is not uncommon for hiring partners at firms to give preference to graduates from the same university that they studied at. Perhaps part of their justification for that is familiarity with the standard of education that they have attained, or a nostalgic kinship of sorts that draws on shared relational ties, but at the deeper level, it is likely that less flattering vulnerabilities are animating those unconscious biases and selection decisions. 

Some of those vulnerabilities can include a false pride in the superiority of one’s pedigree, or the fear of losing power to a group of outsiders. On this first point, I recall former US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia remarking (quite publically) that he wouldn’t have hired one of the best law clerks he ever had if he had known of the law school that the clerk had attended (Scalia attended two of the finest law schools in the US: Georgetown and Harvard, and inherited the clerk – from the less prestigious Ohio State law school – from another judge). On the point of fearing the loss of power to an outgroup, we see this quite clearly in the politicised nature of the judicial selection process in the US. Whether those in power are Democrats or Republicans, a prerequisite for those who are selected for judicial positions will be the sharing of the fundamental ideological or philosophical perspectives of the party in office (so as to preserve their balance of power in the court that allows them to enact their policy objectives through the judgements made). While the executive and judicial branches of government are meant to remain separate to preserve independence, accountability and credibility in the decisions made, in a co-opted and thus corrupted system, the tendrils of one organ will inevitably find permission to extend its reach to the heart of many others.

Through overreach such as this, and other abuses of power to increase the amount of it that can be wielded at the expense of others, the cultures of these institutions erode to attract those who have the same self-serving motivation to manipulate others or the system in order to enrich themselves. No matter what the domain, a broken system is the light that entices the moths who desire to game it for their own purposes. I would be willing to bet that where you work, there will be a handful, and often more, of disengaged individuals who are working to a personal agenda that doesn’t coincide with the collective mission that they signed up to advance. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take many of these people to have a pervasive negative effect on the people around them and sabotage their morale or the larger Esprit de Corps. So how did these malcontents get to where they are in the first place?

Vocational Lessons from the Slap Heard Around the World

Much has been said and written about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock upside the head at the Oscars ceremony last week, but after listening to a lot of this commentary, none of what I had come across focused on the vocational element which Smith raised in his acceptance speech for Best Actor. It is this aspect of his stage of life journey that I want to tease apart here as I think that it carries some important lessons that can help us avoid regressing on our own vocational path.

One of the first things that Smith said in his acceptance speech was “in this time in my life, in this moment, I am overwhelmed by what God is calling on me to do and be in this world…I’m being called on in my life to love people and to protect people and to be a river to my people. I want to be a vessel for love, care and concern.” Naturally, the sentiment of this message stood in stark contrast to the act of violence that Smith committed against Rock, so many were quick to discount the comment and point out the obvious hypocrisy. But in their haste to do this, they missed a valuable opportunity to take a deeper look at how a calling is manifested in our lives, and how it can so easily be subverted by the impulses of the ego.

When Smith said that he strongly felt this calling to serve this role, which was obviously informed by his fatherly portrayal of Richard Williams in King Richard, I didn’t doubt that he sincerely felt this way. About two months before the Oscars took place, I had finished reading Smith’s book Will (written with Mark Manson), which explained well in its later parts the personal transformation that Smith had experienced after (among other things) playing Muhammed Ali, developing a friendship with Nelson Mandela and the initial breakdown of his marriage to Jada Pinkett. What was clear towards the end of the book was that Smith had gained a greater spiritual clarity around his purpose as he moved into middle-age, and the role that earned him the Oscar was quite clearly an extension of that.

Evidently though, this gaining of spiritual clarity wasn’t enough to prevent Smith from losing control of himself and assaulting Rock on live television. So what happened then to lead him to do this? Naturally, none of us were in his head at the time so it is somewhat speculation, but in his book he does articulate some aspects of his psychology that would have explained his reaction to Rock’s joke. While it would be best to read the book to get a first-hand sense of these processes, I feel that I can extrapolate out from them some of the broader lessons for us here that we would do well to heed.

Firstly, we need to understand that while a calling is a path to the unfolding of our latent giftedness and virtuous potentiality, it is and can only be lived from moment to moment. None of us is, or will ever be, fully evolved. This means that we wherever we walk, the shadow of our ego walks with us, waiting for the time for us to indulge it so that it can take us over to give expression to its stored pain and base desires. By not staying present and centred in response to the joke that Rock told about his wife, Smith got triggered and reacted disproportionately to what Rock’s words and role as a comedian warranted. Even if the joke was insensitive given his wife’s alopecia (which I understand that Rock had no knowledge of), that still didn’t justify the act of violence that was committed. While I was initially very shocked and disappointed by Smith’s conduct, particularly given what I knew about his personal growth story, those negative feelings were mitigated by the recognition that we are all Will Smith in our most vulnerable moments. While we may not have acted out exactly as he did in the context that he did it, we can very easily engage in sabotaging behaviour that causes great harm when we lose ourselves in relation to our ego.

The second vocational lesson that I took from what happened is not to let the approval of others be the impetus for losing your way. If you look at the footage of the incident, you will see that Smith initially laughs at the joke told about his wife and appears to have no problem with it. It was only once he presumably (the camera pans away at this point) looks at his wife and sees her displeasure that he decides to get up and approach the stage. At that point, Smith effectively becomes the proxy for his wife’s agitation to unleash upon Rock. While not in any way being an excuse for his behaviour, I understand in part why he got triggered at that point. In his book, Smith wrote about how in his upbringing (i) he learned to associate both acceptance and approval with love, and (ii) his principal regret was not standing up to his father when he witnessed him physically abusing his mother. Upon seeing (i) the disapproval on his wife’s face and feeling in some way that he could earn her love by standing up for her, along with (ii) having the opportunity to right the wrong of the past by protecting the woman he loves, that was his moment to assuage those still-present wounds with calamitous results. I could of course be misguided with this, but what occurred did present a coherent picture after reading the book, and it does help us to place ourselves in a position where we can at least in some respect empathise with his fragility (which we all share).

As he concluded his acceptance speech, Smith referred to advice that he had been given by Denzel Washington in the aftermath of the incident. To Smith Washington had said “at your highest moment, be careful, that’s when the devil comes for you.” While being correct in saying that it is when we are swelled with arrogance and pride, we are most susceptible to violating our conscience, I don’t believe it is an external enemy (or devil) that is the true threat here. The true enemy is and will always be the shadow dimension of being that emerges when we allow ourselves to function unconsciously. As author Ryan Holiday so aptly titled one of his bestselling books, the ego is the enemy. Best we learn that lesson in the absence of the public ridicule that Smith will have to live down before he comes to the same conclusion.