We need our illusions or else we could not face the world; or perhaps I should say we need illusions as a genre, if not necessarily the ones we have. There are some illusions, no doubt, that hinder us or harm us, but there are others that sustain us. Humankind, said Eliot (who used the word before it became politically correct), cannot bear very much reality — especially about itself.
The illusion that one would have been a success but for malevolent circumstance is a very necessary one for a lot of people, for there is no more pitiless or cruel a world than a pure and perfectly functioning meritocracy. Such an arrangement would confront everyone, or at least almost everyone, with his own mediocrity, for the mediocre are by definition in the majority. And who is not mediocre by comparison with Mozart? In a pure meritocracy, everyone would find his true, utterly deserved level; but it is a mere prejudice that if there were justice in the world, everyone would be better off. In a pure meritocracy, there would be no paranoid defense against one’s own nullity — one could blame only oneself for it and no one else. That is why the concept of equality of opportunity, besides implying a kind of Brave New World world, is so deeply vicious, and why so many people who promote it are obviously hate-filled. They do not want to serve humanity but torture it.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Grand Illusion”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-08-19.
June 26, 2023
QotD: The danger to mental health in a functioning meritocracy
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