Are We Responsible for Our Success?

A Book Review of “The Tyranny of Merit” by Michael J. Sandel

I knew Michael Sandels from his book “Justice”. I haven’t read it yet, but I have it on my shelf and have always seen it recommended. So the title of this book intrigued me, and I decided to give it a shot (insert joke about buying new books without reading ones you already own here).

Very bluntly, the thesis is that we live in a meritocracy. Power and prestige are given based on who deserves it. We believe that success comes from hard work, and you are responsible for your own situation. If you end up succeeding, then it’s because of your own merit, and if you don’t, then it’s your fault. It’s a society of winners and losers.

Sandel rejects this, and the whole book argues why this is a flawed idea and hurts our society. I almost gave up on the book in the beginning. I was curious about the book because the author is a philosopher. But all I saw was politics. And bad politics at that.

The greatest argument against a meritocracy is that, quite simply, people aren’t in control of their success. There are always external influences that affect your trajectory, from social support, discrimination, or pure luck. Even if the merit is your own doing, what allows that merit is often not something you’re responsible for. For example, if you go to Harvard because you’re intelligent, you’re not responsible for your intelligence. This is blatantly obvious, but the author really pushes this as far as it can be pushed.

I do believe that a lot of our success is our own doing, but I’m also aware that a lot of it is not. I think emphasizing personal responsibility should be a foundation of society and personal life philosophy, but always with the awareness that not everything is under your control. Taking the latter into account, what the author is trying to grapple with is something I have been struggling with myself. The problem is exactly how to balance personal responsibility with randomness. And it’s something I haven’t been able to find a good solution for.

The author’s solution is simply to deny personal responsibility and emphasize the things that are out of your control. Hence our society of merit is a tyranny. It is based on a flawed assumption of how people progress in life. But that’s a bad solution. It’s undeniable that you always have a degree of control and choice. Yes, sometimes that’s small, but it always exists. Denying or ignoring this is highly problematic. So I didn’t like the book already because I really can’t agree with how he approached the problem. I tried to be open-minded, but I can’t possibly take a worldview the denies something that is absolutely fundamental.

He kept repeating, literally dozens of times, about the harsh side of meritocracy. That while meritocracy rewards responsibility in social status for those who succeed, it’s a heavy burden for those who don’t; they supposedly deserve what they get. This means nothing. The fact that is harsh doesn’t change its reality. Yes, there is randomness, and yes focusing on merit casts a judgement on those who are at the bottom. But how the author frames the solution to that problem is to simply equalize everything. Nothing really is really your own doing, so there is no such thing as merit.

The author doesn’t take a completely fatalist view and doesn’t outright reject responsibility. However, it’s so incredibly tiny that it seems he does this only to give him a safety net and not getting into a free-will debate. In practical terms, if there was no such thing as actual merit, it wouldn’t change anything about what he wrote.

This political exposition was more at the beginning of the book. While it’s persistent throughout, it then moves to more specific cases to build his case. While I was annoyed that it seemed like a politics book instead of a philosophy one as I expected, it later explored the philosophical and theological roots of the belief in merit, which was well researched and explained. It gave a historical account of of the role of Luther, Calvinism and the Puritans and how this has evolved into our own current cultural norms of merit.

While I disagreed head-to-head with what he proposed, perhaps one of the factors that kept me reading was how good he was at arguing the opposite side. He did an incredible steelman of merit-based systems. When he presented an argument, I would make counter-arguments in my head, and he would later explore those arguments, sometimes exactly as I had put them. While I didn’t agree with his refutations, the complete lack of strawman was impressive and respectable.

Furthermore, there were smaller-scale issues that I totally agreed with him. For example, the increasing intellectual elite that society is based on, the stigmatization of the less intelligent, the problems of ivy league admissions, social mobility, alienation of the lower class, obsession with money and success, and the difference between market value and moral value. Perhaps what I enjoyed the most about the book was his ideological analysis of political campaigns and speeches in relationship to merit. I found them incredibly valuable and helpful.

All these allowed the book to have some value for me, which I would have otherwise considered not worth reading. But I did find some errors in some specific arguments, and evidence presented, regardless of the overall thesis. For example, he really overstates the role of the environment in school achievement. A lot of what he presented is done so with a flawed interpretation and even plain ignorance about the topic. For those that want to explore this particular topic, the book “Blueprint” by the behaviour geneticist Robert Plomin is excellent and heavily talks about education in particular. I even have a review of it on Medium, but Medium’s search page is so bad that I can’t find it.

Anyhow, The Tyranny of Merit is a book that I’m a bit torn on because I found that so much of it was really good and so much of it really bad. I struggled as I read because I really wanted to give him a fair chance at his political philosophy, but I just couldn’t accept it. Yes, we need to figure out a way to handle the randomness of reality that is beyond our control and affects our success and shape our society accordingly, but denying merit and responsibility isn’t going to be fruitful.

Despite this, it provides interesting thoughts, and if you belong to a camp that views everything entirely in the lens of merit, then I think this is a good book to make the opposite case and see the flaws and limits of a meritocracy.

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