Grievance Elves vs. Meritocratic Mythmakers: A Tale of Societal Hubris

Exploring the Dissonance Between Identity Politics and Meritocracy

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In the late '70s, our parents would drop us off at Winnipeg First Saints Roller Rink. Admission was $3.50, including skate rental. We sat on the slab benches with the peeling orange paint, laced our skates, and ventured onto the rink.   

Not more than an hour in, the music would cut, and the disc jockey would call out in that teenage confidence all-in voice:

“Girls to the south end, boys to the north.“ 

God forbid the logistics of today, the deadnaming and confusion, would the non-binary stay in the middle?

Slow-dance music would pour from the floor speakers, and the girls were instructed to head toward the boys and “pick a partner” for just the one dance. 

I don’t remember ever being picked.  

But mercifully, they would dim the lights, and we unpicked would lean against the boards. Perhaps some chubby kid from Fort Richmond was beside me, but there was no loser camaraderie; we slinked away, appreciating the louder music and the dimmer lights. 

It was a bit of Squid Games, except they didn’t shoot us; they just told us you are unattractive to the opposite sex, which, if it wasn’t death, was undoubtedly a self-esteem injury.  

Did this truth, this perception of one’s attractiveness, form my identity?  Not forgetting this many years later means something, but this form of identity or self-perception is thankfully fluid, maybe only as fluid as old motor oil at -40 C in Winnipeg, but still liquid. 

I remember that in grade eight, we never called it middle school; it was always junior high. I was walking behind one of the private school girls in a hallway that merged into the front atrium. She didn’t know I was there, and I heard her say my name. Then she turned to her friend, pretending to put her finger down her throat while making a soft barfing noise. 

That would take her off my prom list. 

The point of all this is not to wallow in the trauma of childhood but to establish the concept of identity, both self-identity and visible identity.  The point of identity is not inherently political; it notes what we see, hear, or feel, and what others see, hear, or feel about us.  It is about segregation; it obsesses about differences and the harm they cause.  It is a declaration of victimhood. 

Much identity is imposed on people. It is much weightier than my roller rink embarrassment or having an attractive girl volunteer that the thought of being near me made her physically ill. Identity and identity politics concern themselves with racial differences, physical disabilities, nationality, religion, caste, class, gender preference, sexuality, etc. 

At this point, we often get into the “you don’t walk in my shoes,” which marches confidently toward “Unless you are me (a high bar), anything you have to say about my identity is illegitimate.” " argument, which confidently matches the conclusion that any conversation with you is a waste of time.

“Lived experience” is a bit of a trending phrase, as long as it doesn’t translate into “shut up, you don’t have a right to comment.” 

As with much in life and forms of discourse, the issue is not whether or not a statement is true but rather the issue of scale and, indeed, the recognition that scale matters.  

However, identifying unique identities is not the stopping point. The phrase is “identity politics.” 

Politics is the ebb and flow of power, talk, and decisions. Identity politics is the idea that power can come from distinct identities through unity. 

Who decides if an identity is important?  Usually, the squeakiest wheels, but while a shared identity can bring unity and comfort, its bedrock is a rigid sense of oppression.  A group of lottery winners likely wouldn’t do well in the victimisation games. 

If someone identifies as an optimist, lover of nature, and Christian believer, and that the development of his or her children is his or her mission, is this also not an identity? But they won’t be heading to the barricades.  

The “identities” are deemed deviations from the norm. When taken in the context of identity politics, they are thought to reflect the idea that society does not afford adequate protection, respect, remuneration, or recognition to specific identities or groups of identities.  

Identity politics tries to correct those failures. The framework of identity policies is always negative; they are failures and grievances, and their valence is assumed to be harmful or not worthy of inclusion in the grievance industry pantheon.   

But built into identity politics is always a fatal conceit: the idea that the squeaky-wheel people who determine an identity worthy of special protections or privileges can somehow choose the designated identity or grievance criteria and also judge what remedies should be applied.  

It’s a lot for them to do, and obviously, they can’t be entirely objective when they are this invested. 

The idea of intersectionality is nothing more than recognising that some people may belong to more than one of these designated grievance identities.   So, they’d have more grievance points - like having a shitty loyalty card with even shittier rewards. 

But for those privileged enough to assume that these grievances are illegitimate, to those who say that there is no inequality of birth, nor is there one of inequality of ability or IQ, finances, education and environmental influence - they proclaim that the best way to improve society is to worship at the altar of meritocracy. 

It’s the old “look at all the runs I’m getting,” while ignoring that they keep starting you on third base. 

Even for the meritocrats, suppose the scale issue is reintroduced, given the tendency for people to inflate their position on the scale.  And because of our wretched human tendency to prefer binaries to continuums, you find many not simply quibbling over positions on an agreed-upon scale but saying that if someone doesn’t agree with their rating, for example, on the importance of attending an excellent secondary school, they move quickly to accusing that person of denying that the quality of education matters. 

On the other hand, without genetic equality, there can be no absolute meritocracy.  But just because it’s not absolute doesn’t mean it's not a factor. It’s the old mindless pushing of continuums into binaries.  

From the other camp’s perspective, it should not imply that moving toward greater equity in outcomes can be achieved only through the efforts of the wise, self-proclaimed mandarins of identity politics. First, they don’t exist except in academia, insane asylums or amongst the many narcissists in parliament.  

And a quick reality check on incentives is always worth it  - for example, how many consultants, lawyers, writers, and politicians make a good living milking taxpayers on their way to their purported noble goal of helping our indigenous people?  One can see the natural incentive to pump up the rhetorical volume, but less incentive to solve actual problems.  

When you solve problems, they might not need more white saviours, and the grievance industry-paid players might have less opportunity to drop their snouts in the government pork trough. The perspective is always myopic; there is no proper panoramic vision, you can’t be in the petri dish and achieve a top-down vision of the entire culture, and your broad vision will always be full of biases.  And like bacteria in the petri dish, we don’t have proper perspective drones.  

The real problem with identity politics is its obsession with exaggerating the effects of identity on outcomes.  

However, identity politics is not the only camp. It is just the political one.  

We also have a medical camp that operates under assumptions that contradict those of the identity politics camp.

The medical camp is situated in the lovely hamlet of Hubris.

Its residents accuse identity politics of going too far, saying that stating that one’s fate is wholly bound up in whether one is black, white, Asian, poor, wealthy, well-educated, poorly educated, able-bodied, homosexual, transgender male-female, born in Canada or the United States, etc.  They give such opinions short shrift and proclaim that we live primarily in a meritocracy; work hard, and you’ll do well.  If you don’t do well, it’s your bad attitude and laziness.

Logically, the end goal of someone relying on identity politics should be to even the scales, examine statistical differences in outcomes, correlate them with any grievance or identity category, and simply even things out.

If the causative effects of those identities or combinations were so clearly defined, then this would be true.  

However, the other medical camp, which focuses on expectation and attitude, takes a different approach. They say that how one frames one's expectations for the world has a large, though not absolute, effect on what drives status.

What if you took a happy, healthy, optimistic young man and subjected him to a boot camp that identified the identity grievance groups he rightfully belonged to and explained how that identity made it difficult, if not impossible, for him to move forward? He’d be finished. Furthermore, imagine that his only hope now was the intervention of the grievance adjusters.  

This young man now focuses on the necessity of a grievance adjustor's actions and the scale of the adjuster’s efforts.  

He has switched camps, and he is worse off.  

What if the grievance identity adjusters determined with mathematical certainty the effect of all these grievance identities on the subject?  Where there was a shortage in typical quality of education in that neighbourhood, it would be made up; where there was a downfall in the performance of that gender in that industry, there would be affirmative action on the intake anyway; where there was a statistical correlation between one ethnicity and one measure of success such as marriage unions, there would be bonuses paid out to incentivize those who match the stereotype of the typical outcomes of their identity.  

What if a massive state organisation adopted an identity point system in which all forms of compensation and external incentives attempted to overcome all measures of typical statistical differences in a growing and forever-expanding effort?

Of course, this would fail.  It would fail because the system's bureaucratic weight would collapse under its own weight.  But it would also fail because it simply hadn’t recognized that it was too fully invested in the grievance camp; it would fail because it would be doing - as we humans are so prone to do - cherry-picking a select basket of causative variables in determining success when the truth, perhaps the unknowable truth, was that the variables were too numerous with too many complex interactions to be ever understood.  

The biggest failure of the effort would be the destruction of human agency, the idea that one, on their initiative, has the power to move to a better position.  

Nothing destroys a soul quicker than the conviction that they have no agency, that nothing they do can change their outcome, and that their only hope is the state's intervention.  

Of further concern is the difference in motivation schemes between the two camps: the grievance camp and the positive psychology or meritocracy camp. The first adjusts to inherent biases and structural impossibilities by offering extrinsic rewards, not rewards but adjustments. 

The second, the positive psychology camp, must rely on the power of intrinsic motivators, the idea that pursuing goals in life is intrinsically good. According to research, especially that made famous by writer Dan Pink, intrinsic motivators are almost uniformly superior, except in situations where the effort requires little cognitive effort.  

While hope is part of the structure of an intrinsic drive, it will likely only colour the outer edges of the pursuit of extrinsic rewards. 

How can both these camps work together to improve society?  

First, there must be recognition that pure victimisation is not made up of empathy or pity; it is made up of hopelessness. The result matters; what doesn’t matter is whether grievance warriors or white saviours believe in their moral superiority and their schemes.  

To be consistent, it might make them a more effective distributor of their grievance-based adjustments, but only benefit them, not the recipients of those adjustments. Too much focus on grievances destroys agency and, ultimately, hope.

On the other side is the myth of the self-made man, the meritocratic society.  I worked hard to get here, but I didn’t have it this well all the time; I remember my hard days.  Again, it’s a matter of the scale of the person’s belief in the myth of meritocracy.  

If one believes in pure meritocracy, they have crafted the most fragile straw men; even the faintest gust of mentioning genetic foundations will leave the floor straw-covered. 

Environmental influences - if someone went to a poor school in a poor neighbourhood and felt that being successful was fundamentally incompatible with their ethnic, financial, and family situation, their assessment could be based on anecdotal but accurate data.

Does the young black man in inner-city Baltimore, his mum a single parent, struggling and poor, his father absent, have much of a chance?  When this man, no fool, sees that his education has barely taught him to read, when he sees the only “successful” examples in his peer group are in gangs and consumed with violence and intimidation, is it irrational for this young man to follow this path?  The meritocrats might accurately say he has a narrow pathway out, but it’s a narrow pathway blurred by a fog of despair and hopelessness.  The meritocrat drives by on his ascension, waving at the Baltimore boy, and arrogates himself enough to wonder why the Baltimore boy seems to struggle. 

The myth of meritocracy wears the clothes of optimism, but it covers a cruel flesh.

It takes a person who undoubtedly deserves some partial credit for their successes and turns them into a super non-hero, allowing them to take credit for a massive leap when they were shot out of an advantage cannon. 

Implicitly, they are simultaneously gaslighting those who didn’t get these advantages and pretending that they don’t exist, the old “what’s the matter with you? It’s America; we all had the same opportunity.” 

This paper does not attempt to create a perfect scaling of the effects on outcomes based on identity/grievance factors or, conversely, on the power of a sense of personal agency. 

The effects can not be found as if embedded in hard rock, where some elements could be broken out and extracted.  

Nor are the effects, like some stews, identifiable in terms of composition by the mix of the pieces of meat, vegetables, and spices.  

No, it is like a poorly mixed soup, with elements that interact differently depending on concentration, temperature, and time.  

To champion one pathway alone will leave one as a champion of hubris. 

The hope for societal movement forward is to recognise the dangers of overscaled elements, for example, of saying that poverty has this huge effect when it has a minor impact or, conversely, the threat of putting too much weight on intrinsic drivers when the essential elements for success are not even in view.  This could lead to hopelessness. 

Identity politics and the busy elves of the grievance industry seem no better at improving society than the self-described elites who are mythologizers weaving hubristic yarns about the absolute redeeming power of meritocracy and its reliance on the strength of intrinsic motivators. 

The grievance elves and meritocratic elites may need to start dialling down the volume of their machines, each machine sturdily constructed with the absolute and unscalable virtues of its relative solution. 

Only at this point may they begin to listen to one another.