The American economy is aristocratic sure, but I wouldn't call it fuedal or fascist. I would describe it as Social Darwinist. I don't mean that in terms of what Darwin actually said; what Darwin said is "in nature, the fit survive to pass on their genes." What Social Darwinists heard was "in a just society, the strong should survive and the weak should perish."
The US capitalist aristocracy absolutely worships meritocracy. At multiple levels the US economy has been designed to automatically measure success and failure. And they hook those measurements up to systems of reward and punishment. The end result is that people across the US, at all levels of the economy including CEO level, work solely to manipulate a couple numeric values that represent their worth as an employee.
Example. You're working as a courier for a service like Amazon. Your number is how fast you do your deliveries (with maybe a couple other numbers for delivery success rate or whatever). So inevitably you begin to try less and less to actually deliver the packages in the correct way and just go for the max number as quick as possible. Or find some other way to game the system. Not because you're a dick, but because its the inevitable result of Social Darwinism. People work towards whatever their measure of "fitness" is. Its not just low level employees, managers and executives push for short term profits and then move to another position before the consequences of their short term thinking catches up with them. Again, because that's what the system is set up to encourage. Managers that ignore their numbers don't get anywhere.
Anecdotally, a lot of people in the US find applying for jobs difficult. And I think this is true, as many places in the US would rather a position be left open (or in a cycle of hiring/firing) than accept an under-qualified person or pay to train someone who isn't qualified. To my eyes, what employers want in the US isn't competence, its a Social Darwinist measure of fitness.
Why does M. Night Shyamalan get to keep making movies even tho they all bomb? Why do rich assholes always seem to land on their feet even if they produce an embarrassing scandal or huge money loss for their company? It because by surviving, they showed their fitness. They're the badass, the go-getter, who went and made things happen for themselves. Not for their company. To the Social Darwinist, the guy sitting around with a pile of money and a couple success stories is more fit than the guy who has neither, even if the first guy has more big failures than big successes.
To be clear here, I'm not saying meritocracy is bad, just that this particular form of it is. In the social darwinists' brand of meritocracy you can work backwards and extrapolate merit from results. This places value on short term success markers and competition between individuals. To have a meritocracy success merely needs to be rewarded, it doesn't matter how success is measured or what the rewards are provided that social advancement is primarily the result of competency. There are other ways to do it besides what we have in America.
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4210868 times)