Is Meritocracy Fuelling a Mental Health Crisis?
In a society that prizes merit above all else, we should not underestimate how it feels to be judged as having none.
Photo by Jeswin Thomas
The history of meritocracy is long, complicated and often contradictory. As Adrian Woolbridge writes in The Aristocracy of Talent (2021), it can trace its origins to the works of Plato in Greece and Confucius in China. These early notions of promoting merit were inherently utilitarian, aimed at creating a governing class endowed with the talents necessary to lead the masses. However, as meritocracy has developed into the twenty-first century, it has become increasingly justified on deontological grounds: as a just means of rewarding those who strive for success and/or are endowed with natural talents.
The term itself was coined in 1958 by Michael Young in The Rise of the Meritocracy. As a satirical work, the book was far from complimentary of a merit-based society, linking it with permanent hierarchy and ensuing social unrest. More recently, philosopher Michael Sandel has emerged as the leading modern critic of meritocracy. In The Tyranny of Merit (2020), Sandel argues meritocracy has allowed the wealthy of today to view the less successful with contempt and dislike. To illustrate this point he asks his readers to imagine two societies, both highly unequal. One is an aristocracy, the other a meritocracy. He then asks readers to adopt the perspective of the poor and answer: which is a more desirable society to reside within?
On purely financial terms, a meritocracy seems more so. After all, in a meritocratic society any individual theoretically has the opportunity to lift themselves from poverty. But Sandel maintains that life is about more than just money. Studies show individuals usually value the respect and admiration of their peers more than financial gain. In a meritocracy, inequalities are justified on deservingness. It is maintained that the rich are rich because they deserve to be and the poor are poor on the same grounds. To be poor in a meritocracy is depicted as a sign of personal failure, and it can act as a social stigma.
A study by a team of social psychologists found that well-educated respondents in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium and the United States hold more prejudice against the poorly educated than against any other group. Moreover, they were unapologetic in their disdain for the less successful; suggesting that, for them, low educational achievement is an indicator of personal failure. Most worryingly, rather than reject this belittlement, the poorly educated seemed to “internalize” it.
In the past few decades an increasing trend has linked low educational attainment to increased suicide rates. A 2014 study published in World Psychiatry found that, amongst other causes, “a low level of education” was the strongest predictor of “making a suicide attempt”. A nationwide health monitory study in Norway found similar results, as did the Office for National Statistics, which reported that the suicide rate for university students in the UK is far lower than the rate for the rest of the population at the same age. This data is surprising: historically, increases in suicide rates were often attributed to modernity, specifically better education. This seems inherently logical since education dismantles many of the comforting myths we hold about the world.
So why does the opposite now appear to be true? Why is the mental health crisis of the twenty-first century disproportionately affecting the poorly educated? In Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (2017), economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton analyse the increasing deaths from suicides, drug overdoses, and alcoholic liver disease in the United States. For white men and women between 45-54, these ‘deaths of despair’ have increased threefold from 1990-2017, with those not possessing a degree most at risk.
They attribute some of this to globalisation, the indignity of insecure service-level jobs, and the “slowly unfolding loss of a way of life for the white, less educated working classes”. But they claim it goes further than this, suggesting that the social stigma meritocracy heaps onto the unsuccessful also shares the blame. In their words, “a four-year degree has become the key marker of social status as if there were a requirement for nongraduates to wear a circular scarlet badge bearing the letters BA crossed through by a diagonal red line”.
Politicians, journalists, academics and others have produced thousands of publications on how to allow those with merit to rise as far as their talents can take them. But it is now time to devote more energy to consider the fate of the less successful? After all, in a meritocratic society where one’s success is equated to their worth, we should not underestimate how devastating it must be to be judged as meritless.
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