This was inspired by a series of Twitter posts, although one was also inspired by a rather long Facebook post made by famous Dirty Jobs host, Mike Rowe. Then, as with other times, Mike has come off as potentially controversial for taking a stand to suggest that an individual's success in life is equivalent to the burden he or she is willing to bear--a view many have come to suspect is ignorant and essentially right-wing. To that, I have a few things to say.
First, I get it; okay? I get it not just as somebody who considers himself somewhere left-of-center economically, but as someone who, like many other autistic men, has known tremendous discrimination in the job world, and who knows that my group is not unique; in some states, it's still legal to discriminate against homosexuals in the workforce. Unfair bosses are a reality. It's understandable that people are skeptical when someone of a political bent talks of meritocracy; political people, after all, have their beliefs, their vision of what beliefs and characteristics makes a better or worse person, and it's hard to buy such people put aside such biases to base their definition of a hard worker strictly on objective qualities like efficiency, precision and tenacity. Furthermore, there's no doubt that some prominent people on the right, among them Margaret Thatcher, have become well-known, and variously-regarded (depending on one's own political bias) for promoting a meritocracy as the solution to all society's woes; nor is there much doubt as to why. The existence of that outstanding worker who can grab the bull by the horns, and go from rags to riches of his or her own device, is a talking-point for those who allege that no compassionate help from above is necessary, and no major hindrances to worker advancement are built into companies. Are such workers and their inspiring success stories typical? Expect that question to be argued for decades to come, with very little hope of a satisfying answer arising, as that would hinge on the absurd presumption that all workers and all employers are equally as ethical or corrupt as their peers.
The second thing that must be said, however, is that following this healthy skepticism through to preemptively belittling anyone who dares to stress the value of hard, meaningful work, is, as Rowe suggested, doing people no favors. Leftists may be correct in identifying why more Right-leaning thinkers place a high value on hard work--because it puts the burden of proof on workers, rather than their wealthy constituents--but to presume this is the case with every person who says such things is not in actuality reigning in unfair considerations; it is merely allowing the political Right, with its comparatively low respect to the underdogs, to be the exclusive venue wherein such things are discussed, with all the bias that entails. Today, vocal people on the Left are making the same mistake with "meritocracy" as vocal people on the Right have been making for decades with "liberalism"; that is, surrendering the term to the opposition, to be fed back to people in skewed form, when both ideas as they were originally conceived contributed to tremendous citizen growth on a sub-political level.
It is important to note that while politicians are frequently obnoxious for the things they spout over and over again, sometimes the issue isn't that those things aren't true, so much as that they're almost never the whole truth. The unfortunate factor underlying this trend is that their career depends on appealing to certain sorts of people and convincing those people to look down on other sorts, and that means playing up some people's faults while sweeping others under the rug. Most people outside of politics, though, should have the ability to think about things more deeply. Most of us by now have come across (among many other types of people) both obnoxious finaglers in high places who place unreasonable demands on people in lower places, and irritating slackers who don't even put demands on themselves that most others see as no-brainers. We should be able to make multi-factored analyses based on such experiences, but too often people who are passionate about things fall prey to what could be called "political cooties"; that is, knee-jerk reactions against the sort of ideas they deem hostile to their interests, and in this case, the real victims will be workers, unable to form a whole picture of the world important to them when led by people who only focus on select parts of it.
What the work world (including that part of it concerned with why certain types of people are lagging behind others) actually needs are dialogue and analysis by people who aren't so full of themselves that they let mere words get to them and shut them down. Before the reductive binary bore of Right Vs Left got involved, our culture's politics had already embraced the more meaningful idea that there is wisdom in crowds, and none of us is as smart as all of us. Let's try to bring that back and face these problems together.
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