That's the history of most institutions. There's a mistake about believing in merit and skills when it's usually a combination of political skills, ability to g

That's the history of most institutions. There's a mistake about believing in merit and skills when it's usually a combination of political skills, ability to game the system (which are not necessarily the most important for the actual job) and initial privilege/wealth (a bad simplification of the point I'm trying to make on personal circumstances that don't relate to effort, it's more nuanced). It's not the end of the world as long as you're not authortiarian and inclined to believe that in any hierarchy, the more valuable/skilled/apt person is naturally at the top. It's very hard to create a system that scales and doesn't show signs of heavy bureocracy and/or corruption (if you know about the internals) because, very soon, it's easy to find out a gap between working for your career and working to maximise the output value of your job.