The Thing about Merit

There is no such thing as being self-made. I refuse to believe that human beings and anyone for that matter, have any natural capacity to be self-made.

Michael Sandel’s “The Tyranny of Merit — What’s Become of the Common Good,”- is a hard read but had quite an impact on my deeply rooted opinions on, life, basically. The thought of wanting to solve all these misconceptions plagues me to a point where I don’t even put an effort to think. At the risk of sounding like I’ve figured it all out after one book, I put together 2 things I’d like to believe I learned.

1. The irony about self-made people:

The concept of ‘self-made’ or self-sufficiency had the heaviest impact on me. What a life-changing experience it was to learn that the more one considers oneself self-made, the harder it is to instill gratitude and humility. And this matters because it is rare to care about the common good without these sentiments. Most of us enjoy the pride we take in the independence we set for ourselves. The pride we take in overcoming a struggle all by ourselves has a strange yet dominating pleasure we would like to project out to the world. What is more strange to me now, is how such a character is easily idolized and the admirations for being self-made is almost religious. One may easily recognize the dichotomy between being self-made and having helping hands but this is just banality because the concept just doesn’t exist. So in a nutshell, one can never be self-made therefore should never think one is. Or is this just my take?

2. You succeed if you work hard:

If you believe in a perfectly moral universe, the forces would be arranged in such a way that success aligns with merit and failure with fault. I think we’re made to believe, right from our birth, that we are always responsible for our own actions. Start with our education system to our professional environments, we are somehow etched to the belief that we can rise as far as our talents will take us. These kinds of concepts are undeniably empowering. And while we constantly inflate the significance of hard work and success, we also perhaps harshly look down on failure. This is yet another web of conflicts because while we believe in destiny, we also somehow can control it with hard work. But we’ve all come to a realization at some point in our lives, or every day in my case, that we don’t live in a perfectly moral universe.