So some form of meritocracy. Are there any instances in the history of the human race where that idea has worked? My impression is that it always fails due to

So some form of meritocracy. Are there any instances in the history of the human race where that idea has worked? My impression is that it always fails due to corruption or incorrect evaluation metrics or some other fundamental flaw in the starry-eyed idea of separating "good" from "bad". In theory, it's perfectly straightforward to write a flawless, unexploitable large program in C. In practice, we get hacked by plugging something into a Lightning port.