There's areason why capitalism was contrived by a white male merchant from Scotland....

Ohhh capitalism...your like that itch that wont go away and is responsible for millions of deaths. Or that burning sensation that just won't go away....what were we thinking getting involved with you? Penicillin won't fix this one, unfortunately, it will take immense class struggle, solidarity, and organizing to cure this disease. But like any diseases there are side effects that might by unseen, hidden by the more painful or prevalent symptoms. One of capitalism's most prolonged and socially damaging side effects has been the perpetuation of the myth of meritocracy to the point were it mirrored what Durkheim would marvel at as a homogeneous collective consciousness of capitalism. That is to saw we have ingrained capitalism into our mindset and inoculated against "socialistic" concepts and mental tendencies. In the arena of ideas in the American mind set meritocracy is the grand champ, of course it took the Tonya Harding approach of winning the gold. Meritocracy is defined as "Governance by elites who deserve to wield power because they possess merit (defined as 'intelligence plus effort') instead of by those who merely possess wealth or belong to privileged classes." (From www.businessdictionary.com) Of course its not the wealthy end of the spectrum that the mythological meritocracy rides his winged stallion to swoop in and defeat. Its the down trodden who are trampled by meritocracy's heavy hand when they raise a protest as to the conditions they are forced to live in. Of course like all myths, someone has to be decapitated before its over. Since the mid-1970's its the incensed poor and working poor whose wages have been forced to stare into the eyes of Medusa and remain stagnant. This while the Grendel-like creature known simply as globalization swings his club of deindustrialization and defecates gentrification onto every block. And like the 12 dwarfs we wait for prince charming and his marauding band of [insert political party affiliation] to make our world a better place to live. And its all because we were to damn lazy to fight back or to work harder! Really, come on working poor, 15 year old Vietnamese debt-slaves will do the work for .45 cents an hour while being threatened with rape and beatings by their Nike, Sony, and Apple overseers. You really think you can keep your job at minimum wage AND get sick days.....you should be thankful for having a job period. I mean if you work hard enough you can own the company right.....right....NAH just kidding get away from me with your food stamps.

If only it was framed this way. Instead meritocracy is instilled in the lives of millions of school kids daily not just in their history classes but in the science faires, in the football games, in all of this we frame the world around this individualistic threshing in which those who work hard succeed and those who fall to the ground can count themselves as the only source of their peril. Take for example drug use.

Meritocracy says: "Addicts and abusers got to where they are based on their flawed moral character and poor decision making. Had they been more observant and long-sighted in their decision making, had they been stronger willed they wouldn't have succumbed to drugs, alcohol, or other addictions."

Reality is however, poised to tell us a different story. A story Elliot Currie enlightens us with in his piece "The Futile War on Drugs." In explaining the fermentation of a culture of drugs and savage individualist capitalism which has arisen in concentrated urban minority communities Currie states. "The transformation of poo communities has, in shot been cultural as well as structural- involving subtler changes in values and attitudes as well as massive shifts in economic opportunities and standards of living." whoever he is quick to point out that the perceived savagery of this cultural shifts is in fact a "somewhat distorted version of the values that came to dominate all too much of mainstream economic life." So by the time of the "drug boom" of the mid-80's what a young minority man saw when he had the opportunity to meditate on his future was inconceivable unemployment or under employment, a lack of or non-existent government subsidized assistance to keep him from falling into poverty, gentrification pushing him farther and farther away from what is left of his community and social safety net, and a well to do white man in every SUV that drives down the freeway that dissects his neighborhood. I'd love to see John Wayne over come that one.

The difference here is one of methodological perspective, one sees the world through the lens of a social Darwinists individualistic ego-centrism. That is to say its always the wealthy who proclaim their own individual skills and merit as the harbingers of their wealth. Poor people tend not to proclaim, "if only I weren't so lazy and worked 16 instead of 12 hours a day, then I wouldn't be AS poor." The other methodological perspective views social trends and outcomes as the output of a system construed by a select few in which public policy, mass media, and funding is the scaffolding that erects what it pleases. In their analysis of the socio-economic roots of homelessness Timmer, Eitzen, and Talley state that, "the urban homeless problem is fundamentally a housing problem." That is the diagnosis is a condemnation of the system rather than the patient. It would be ridiculous for a physician to blame a patient for getting sick if they knew they were exposed to pathogen X or Y. Yet, this is what the myth of meritocracy perpetuates.

So how to do you kill the myth, by killing its hero. According to Timmer, Eitzen

"All government is big government, the question is big government for whom?" Howard Zinn