Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The age of the performer-entrepreneur Related Iron Musk is not a renegade outsider Employees fired after writing letter criticising Musk

“Hell Joseon” or capitalist hell

The author has ignored exploitation of labour as a source of wealth. In fact, he ignored that even inherited wealth comes from past labour. Note that the word capitalism is not mention even once. As regarding why “ the belief that Britain is a meritocracy is ingrained in our collective psyche,” one has to include the role of ideology . Where does wealth comes from? Related The meritocrats shall inherit the earth What Does the Ruling Class Do When it Rules?

A very good article. The Meritocrats shall inherit the earth

“The Tyranny of Merit  [by Michael Sandel] is infused with moral urgency, elegantly written and cogently argued, with a core conclusion both succinct and indisputable: meritocracy does not counter inequality, it justifies it.” Why the ideal of meritocracy only deepens inequality

I think arguments that reinforce irrationality and conservatism always find millions of followers. Those millions of people have their prejudices, and their opinions on subjects like Marxism, socialism, human nature, etc are based on lack of knowledge and miseducation or material interest. The contradiction lies in this: in their daily life people generally make rational decisions, but when it comes to subjects like capitalism, hierarchy, human nature, socialism, ‘ordinary’ people have irrational ideas about those subjects. Their ideas has been built over many years, and often since childhood. Most people do not break away from what was inculcated in their minds at home and at school. Like a Muslim preacher who gains fame by hitting the right neurones of a Muslim mind that prone to conservatism, John Peterson is a Western preacher for a Western audience that too has its own conservatism and prejudices. And the more capitalism as an economic and social system enters into crisis and ...

You can be your own tyrannical boss The review is short , but  the analysis  is 13 pages long  I personally skipped the pages which contain statistics, etc. I am bad in maths. However, the first pages, and then p. 12 are an essential read. "We identify three interrelated cultural changes that have been influential in explaining recent shifts in young people’s sense of self and identity, and which closely match processes important to perfectionism development. These changes are (a) the emergence of neoliberalism and competitive individualism, (b) the rise of the doctrine of meritocracy, and (c) increasingly anxious and controlling parental practices. In what follows , we describe each of these cultural changes and outline how they relate to perfectionism."

How treating students as customers turns the idea of meritocracy into a joke

"Perhaps the central function that meritocracy plays — complete with SAT exams and other presumptively objective testing mechanisms — is in normalizing the growing class disparities in money, power, and resources. Top universities have been the essential building blocks of our new Gilded Age, facilitating the transfer of wealth and opportunity from one privileged generation to the next — and doing so while cloaking the extent to which today’s meritocratic elite are really the beneficiaries of a modern version of an "old boys’ club." And this applies to elite universities in general, "[H]igher education is a profound instrument of social power, one that can project values independent of state and corporate demands and offer its students and community members a space for their own cultivation. The dilemma is that our universities, in particular our elite ones, are doing less of this work and far more of the invisible work of class reproduction. " Meritocra...