Recently I was in a late 1800's home in Denver. From the outside it doesn't look mansion-like huge, but it was huge. It had over a dozen rooms, and long since r

Recently I was in a late 1800's home in Denver. From the outside it doesn't look mansion-like huge, but it was huge. It had over a dozen rooms, and long since renovated "servant's quarters". Hindsight isn't really 20/20, is it? I look back on that era and think how blatantly racist and classist it was. But in contrast to today's segregation based on race and class, all we've done is move the servants out of the homes they serve, put them on public transit, and make them live 50 miles away. It's just feudalism vs a kind of neo-feudalism. And meritocracy in practice is different than meritocracy as an ideal. Perhaps Vulcans have the extreme discipline required to actually adhere to a strict system of merit. But humans do not. Anyone in a meritocratic environment lowers the ladder to friends and family, people they like, which immediately corrupts the meritocracy. Meritocracy in practice corrupts itself, the very thing the ideal proclaims to avoid. And even the ideal version pretty much pre-supposes that those without merit, without wealth, don't really deserve anything other than what they have (or don't have), there isn't anything to do about it, and it might even be immoral to intervene. The book of Job, and numerous stories of Christ in the New Testament are very critical of wealth and merit. And that's probably why the message doesn't go over very well anywhere with institutional power and wealth, be it the Pharisees, or Silicon Valley's wealthy (and regardless of whether they're liberal or conservative).