Groupism vs. Meritocracy

Merit represents an individual as having personal agency to improve or reduce his or her own fortune. The criticism of meritocracy is that it moves too slowly and is indifferent to differences between groups. A broad upside is often stated that it allows for the truest expression of competence due to its insistence that, own the whole, an individual test his metal in the battlefield of market competition.

It is not clear what to call a system that increasingly seeks to emphasize group identity in pursuit of “equity.” For those who have been living under a rock for the last several years, equity means equality of outcome across groups, period. There shall be no group differences and if there are such differences are to be seen as outcomes of discrimination or more broadly an unfair power-disadvantage that keeps individuals of particular groups from expressing their true abilities. This is the view that context is everything and that the individual is not prime in her own existence. I think we could call this “groupism.”