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The Tyranny of Merit: How the Pursuit of Winning Poisoned Our Common Life

The question that lingers after every crisis, after every election that deepens our divides, is not simply about policy failures. It is a more existential one: what went wrong with our civic life? The pandemic laid bare economic fault lines, but it also illuminated a spiritual rot—a rancorous, polarized political culture that left many feeling humiliated and others emboldened by hubris. The source of this malaise reaches beyond inequality. It lies in the very ideal that societies have come to worship: meritocracy.

In recent decades, the chasm between society’s winners and losers has grown into an unbridgeable gulf. This is partly a story of material inequality, but it is equally a story of attitudes. Those who landed on top absorbed a seductive narrative: their success was their own doing, a pure reflection of merit. By extension, those left behind had only themselves to blame. This way of thinking, rooted in the seemingly attractive principle that equal opportunity justifies unequal outcomes, forms the core of the meritocratic ideal. The problem, as philosopher Michael Sandel has argued in his influential work The Tyranny of Merit, is not simply that we fail to live up to this ideal. The ideal itself is deeply corrosive.

The Dark Side of the Meritocratic Promise

The meritocratic promise—that if everyone has an equal chance, winners deserve their winnings—is, in practice, a lie. Social mobility is far more limited than the myth suggests. Children born into poverty tend to remain poor; affluent parents expertly pass advantage to their children. At Ivy League universities, a shocking concentration of privilege persists: there are more students from the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from the entire bottom half combined. Yet the deeper flaw is not the hypocrisy. It is the moral damage the ideal inflicts even when it is partially realized.

Meritocracy is corrosive of the common good for two reasons. First, it breeds hubris among the successful. Credentialed elites come to inhale too deeply of their own success, forgetting the luck, inherited wealth, stable families, and sheer good fortune that eased their path. They begin to believe they have earned everything solely through effort and talent, and they look down on those less fortunate, less credentialed. Second, it produces a corresponding humiliation among those who lose out. If success is a measure of merit, failure must be a measure of personal deficiency. This is the dark logic at the heart of the creed: those who do not flourish in the competitive race have no one to blame but themselves.

How the Ethos of Merit Fueled Populist Backlash

This toxic combination of winner’s arrogance and loser’s humiliation has profound political consequences. One of the most potent sources of the populist backlash that has swept through democracies is a legitimate complaint: working people feel that meritocratic elites look down on them. This perception is grounded in reality. As globalization deepened inequality and stagnant wages became the norm for many, the advice offered by the winners carried a sharp, thinly veiled insult. “Go to college. What you earn depends on what you learn. You can make it if you try.”

The implicit message was brutal: if you lack a university diploma, if you do not flourish in the knowledge economy, your failure is your own fault. This meritocratic creed transformed systemic economic shifts into personal moral failings. It is no wonder that many working people turned against the elites who dispensed this counsel, rejecting not only their policies but the very values they claimed to embody.

Rethinking the Role of College as Arbiters of Opportunity

A central tenet of our meritocratic order is the university degree as the gateway to dignified work and a decent life. Those of us who spend our days in the company of the credentialed often forget a simple fact: in the United States, nearly two-thirds of adults do not hold a four-year college degree. Building an economy that makes a diploma a necessary condition for social respect is folly. Encouraging higher education and broadening access for those who cannot afford it are worthy goals, but they are not a solution to inequality. Instead, this obsession with arming people for meritocratic combat diverts attention from a more urgent task: improving the material and symbolic conditions of those who lack a diploma but who make essential contributions to society.

The table below contrasts the meritocratic promise with its lived reality, revealing the gap that fuels public discontent.

Aspect	Meritocratic Promise	Lived Reality
Opportunity	Equal chance for all to rise based on talent and effort	Persistent class advantage; top 1% dominate elite universities
Reward	Winners deserve their success as a measure of personal merit	Success often depends on luck, family wealth, and inherited networks
Social Value	Market earnings reflect true contribution to the common good	Essential work (caregiving, sanitation) is undervalued and underpaid
Dignity	Credentials confer respect; failure implies moral inadequacy	Humiliation of non-college workers fuels resentment and polarization

Recovering the Dignity of Work

To heal our civic life, we must renew the dignity of work and place it at the center of our politics. Work is not merely a means to a paycheck; it is a way of contributing to the common good and winning recognition for that contribution. As Robert F. Kennedy articulated half a century ago: “Fellowship, community, shared patriotism—these essential values do not come from just buying and consuming goods together. They come from dignified employment at decent pay, the kind of employment that enables us to say, ‘I helped to build this country. I am a participant in its great public ventures.’” That civic sentiment is largely absent today, replaced by the cold assumption that the money people make accurately measures their social worth.

Martin Luther King Jr. exposed the error of that assumption in a reflection on the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis. “The person who picks up our garbage,” King said, “is in the final analysis as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity.” The pandemic made this truth undeniable. It revealed how deeply society relies on workers it often overlooks: delivery drivers, maintenance staff, grocery clerks, warehouse workers, truckers, nurse assistants, child care providers, and home health aides. These are not the best-paid or most honored workers, yet they are now called essential. The moment demands a serious public debate about bringing their pay and recognition into alignment with the true importance of their labor.

Towards a Humble Ethics of Success

Beyond policy, a moral and spiritual turning is needed—a reckoning with our meritocratic hubris. Each of us must ask uncomfortable questions: Do I morally deserve the talents that enable me to flourish? Is it my doing that I live in a society that prizes the abilities I happen to have, or is that my good luck? To insist that success is purely one’s due makes it impossible to see oneself in another’s shoes. Appreciating the role of luck—the accident of birth, the grace of God, the mystery of fate—can prompt a life-saving humility. “There but for the accident of birth go I.”

This spirit of humility is the civic virtue we need most urgently now. It is the only beginning of a way back from the harsh ethic of success that drives us apart. Humility points beyond the tyranny of merit toward a less rancorous, more generous public life—one in which we can honor the contributions of all workers, recognize the role of fortune in our own achievements, and rebuild a common good that no amount of individual winning can alone sustain.

Criticisms

• The meritocratic ideal is criticized for its corrosive effect on social solidarity, inflating hubris among the successful while inflicting humiliation on those who do not reach the top.
• Widespread failure to acknowledge the role of luck, inherited advantage, and systemic bias in determining success is challenged as a fundamental moral blindness.
• The narrative that a university diploma is a necessary condition for dignified work is faulted for devaluing essential labor and excluding a majority of the population from full social respect.
• Political and economic elites are accused of dispensing advice—“go to college,” “you can make it if you try”—that implicitly blames workers for structural economic shifts beyond their control.
• The credentialing system, particularly at elite institutions, is condemned for perpetuating class privilege and functioning more as an inherited aristocracy than a genuine ladder of opportunity.
• The assumption that market earnings reliably reflect contribution to the common good is exposed as a dangerous falsehood, one that leads society to dishonor the caretakers, cleaners, and laborers on whom everyday life depends.
• Public discourse is reproached for abandoning the civic language of shared sacrifice and mutual obligation, replacing it with a rhetoric of individual desert that frays the bonds of community.
• The myth of the self-made individual is rejected as a source of complacency among the affluent and an insult to the many who work hard yet struggle to make ends meet.