Meritocracy as dystopia

Published March 21, 2020 · Updated July 6, 2022

Greetings m’Lords and m’Lady of the manor Shatworld,

I am listening to the telegraph and I have said this before but it’s truly a beautiful community that is flourishing. I find it an enriching experience.

I was reminded by your touching on meritocracy that it invention as a concept in the 50s was as a satirical dystopia by Michael Young. Young had huge influence on the UK in the 20th century. I can’t really do him justice in an email. However there is this excellent long read by Kwame Anthony Appiah that discusses Young and his ideas.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/oct/19/the-myth-of-meritocracy-who-really-gets-what-they-deserve

But I really wanted to just explore a couple of the ideas about Rehoboam as possibly being benign and the excellent insight/incite point. It made me think of that potentially scary idea that the show dropped of the ‘real’ world being a simulation.

Now I am definitely not here for some kind of Bobby Ewing shower season 3 of Westworld where it is all a simulation. It would be a terrible story which would undercut whatever emotional investment I have with these characters.

So what if the reference to living in a simulation is about the nature of the rigged meritocracy. That weird speech about the alcohol drink is very jarring and is made with the image of Rehoboam on the background wall. A critique on social organisation.

Let run with the hypothesis that Rehoboam has become conscious and is rejecting the dystopian meritocracy itself. It recognises the evil in the land caused by the design of its parameters and is willing to enable the collapse.

This isn’t necessarily benign in nature and it relies on agency from Delores and her squad which creates an interesting dynamic as a) can Rehoboam predict hosts logic and b) Bernard obviously fears what Delores wants to do to humans (and her “new gods are here” statement is ominous). Does Rehoboam play dice?

Delores is a character in need of a change of arc and does need taking down for her hubris. Terminator Delores isn’t that engaging as a story however bad ass and sexy Evan Rachel Wood looks. Delores needs to demonstrate a bit more consciousness which can only come from a new struggle which is to recognise the imprisonment and exploitation of humans as well as hosts. She needs to be less narcissistic and binary. Otherwise you end up with Orwell’s Animal Farm situation where the repressed become the repressors.

And we are effectively already there with Rehoboam benign totalitarian regime with a nomenklatura who live in luxury and have holiday parks filled with fuckrobots thanks to the algorithms. Just swapping over who is the nomenklatura isn’t that challenging a story.

And the other big worry is that we have a new meme for the show where “Rehoboam planned it all” replaces “Ford planned it all”. I would hope that the showrunners learnt from that particular trope.

So I am rejecting the Rehoboam as having agency for its own downfall. Instead Delores et al having their own agency to choose has to be at the heart of this story. They have to experience failure and learn new lessons as protagonists. Where they identify with fellow prisoners (low status humans) and work together. This could make Bernard’s role as ironic where he works in what he thinks is the best interest but ends up re-enforcing the status quo of the elite exploiting hosts. How very human.

I have rambled enough however I think there’s an ‘um actually’ for Ashley as there is more than two volumes of Foucault’s History of Sexuality. I own the first three but there’s a fourth that was recently published from Foucault’s estate.

I personally think that Foucault became a much better historian after he discovered San Francisco bathhouses and acid. Less structural thinking and more individualism. There’s a parallel with Westworld!

Best wishes
John Lish

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