The tyranny of meritocracy in the USA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_g6WTZPJLw

Peter Kopa, 25.2.2022, Prague

The USA is where this de facto tyranny has originated, and it is highly discriminatory towards the vast majority of people who are not gifted in terms of IQ or other aspects that have to do with personal triumph, within the framework of tough competition in labor and business. The tyranny of meritocracy in the USA and everywhere is something for which each is responsable insofar he ignores his dignity and eternal destiny.

Genesis of the American culture

First of all, I think it is important to define the word culture, which is the objectification of values in a given time and place from the point of view of truth and beauty. The United States of America, because of its size and its enormous capabilities, continues today to exert a very important cultural influence of first order throughout the world. It is therefore interesting to ask about the roots of American culture, to see what are its the ingredients, its genesis in history and how its positive and negative results are manifested.

As is well known, the population of the United States was formed to the rhythm of the arrival of the first Christian immigrants from England and Ireland, persecuted by Cromwell and William of Orange. These people brought with them a strong religious conviction, especially of Calvinist and Protestant origin, which determined a very special valuation of things and was very decisive for the future cultural development of the United States. Thus, the U.S. Constitution was not influenced by the French Revolution, unlike some European and Latin American countries, but above all by Calvinist and Protestant Puritanism.

It must be taken into account that the indigenous culture had practically no influence on the formation of North American culture, simply because the Indians were annihilated due to their aggressiveness, because they could not tolerate the intrusion of strange peoples who threatened to extinguish the resources of their own survival, specifically the bison and other animals. This whole endeavor is what has been called the Conquest of the West, which has produced many heroes, many literary works of the highest quality and many ‘far west’ movies.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_1YELZ7fps

It is important to bear in mind that the Protestant and Calvinist religious profile, with the passing of time, led to the prohibition of European art, theater, dance and popular entertainment. That is to say, it was diametrically opposed to the reception of European art in the XVIII and XIX centuries. Later this disappeared under the influence of the Catholic faith, very open to truth and beauty.

The world wars were followed by a technological and economic boom in the USA, which led to enormous business investments all over the world, thus initiating the most important phase of the USA’s cultural influence. Today the vast majority of films are American, as are videos. A lot of young people go to study at American universities and this cultural hegemony has been accentuated lately even more with the digital instruments of communication and diffusion.

What kind of culture has distilled history in the United States?

Unfortunately, the Calvinist and Protestant element has not been able to withstand the growing harassment of a materialistic vision of life, favored by a vertiginous technological and economic development that has unfortunately led to a redefinition of what man is. And this not only at the theoretical level, under the strong influence of European rationalism, but above all at the practical level of everyday life.

Concretization of this negative development is the fact that all social, economic and cultural comparisons are primarily based on a monetary and quantitative point of view and evaluation, leaving aside deeper moral and spiritual evaluations, as would correspond to a Western culture framed in the ancient Judeo-Christian wisdom. Jordan Peterson speaks in this sense of a demographic collapse ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcA3rI19jYM) as the most dramatic consequence of this process.

This ignorance of man’s identity, as a being with a horizon of eternal and transcendent life, destined for moral fulfillment in his relationship with God, on the basis of the Ten Commandments of the Decalogue, is leading to great disasters, which I will briefly summarize in a few points:

There is a tendency to value man exclusively according to his personal intellectual capacity and according to his productivity in the economic order. This criterion leads to the imposition of a cruel inequality among men, because by nature and by logic, not everyone can be brilliant. Some have more and others less endowments of intelligence or capacity for work.

Therefore, the great masses who have not been able to climb the social ladder, feel despised by those at the top, which in turn creates enormous social tensions that give rise to aggressive political groups and easily manipulated by ideologies in the style of WOKE or ‘cancel culture’. This is the context of the whole problem of the Negro who was forcibly brought from Africa to work under the hot sun of the southern United States in agricultural labor.

Consequences of meritocracy

Therefore, this economic or intellectual elitism has nowadays an important role in the American cultural world. The famous American dream is something different for Americans than for immigrants. For the former it means attaining at least a million dollar net worth and for the latter it means being able to live in the USA and accept the challenge offered by its enormous opportunities. J. Peterson argues that every man has a great potential of unactualized capabilities (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_1YELZ7fps

It is interesting to note at this point that the European monarchy had also established a vertical society, i.e., on the one hand the noble elite and on the other hand the vast majority of modest people who had to work mainly in the fields. But the big difference is that then, thanks to the Christian faith, there was a deep conviction of equality of all men before God and this equality explains why there were not so many social tensions compared to what we know today in the United States. The phenomenon of the French Revolution was due precisely to the loss of this conviction of equality due to the influence of anti-Christian rationalism.