Mériquité is not a meritocracy in disguise

The most frequent misreading consists in removing from Mériquité (the doctrine of debt and merit) the debt, reciprocity, improved transmission and unconditional dignity, in keeping merit alone, and then in being surprised to recognise meritocracy in it. A reply in ten points.

Point by point, to dispel the misreading

Dear Sir,

I have read your contribution on Mériquité with care. I valued it, for a political doctrine does not grow in complacent silence: it grows through scrutiny, contradiction and the questions put to it.

You have raised several legitimate questions. They give me the opportunity to provide the clarifications you call for. I shall therefore answer you point by point, not to close down the debate, but to enlighten you — and perhaps to dispel a few shadows that your own reading has cast.

Your conclusion in fact rests upon an initial misreading: you remove from Mériquité the debt, reciprocity, improved transmission, unconditional dignity and tranquillity; you keep merit alone; and then you are surprised to recognise meritocracy in it.

In other words, you saw a door, forgot the house, and then concluded that the house was a door.

That is not yet a refutation of Mériquité. It is a reduction of Mériquité to precisely what it is not.

1. Merit is not meritocracy

Let us begin with an elementary distinction.

Merit is a notion.

Meritocracy is a principle for allocating places: positions, offices or rewards should go to those judged the most qualified, rather than to heirs, to favourites or to the best connected.

Mériquité is a political doctrine founded upon a relation of reciprocity: the individual owes something to the community that shaped them; in return, that community must protect their rights, develop their capacities and prevent their effort from being stolen.

Using the word “merit” is therefore not enough to turn a doctrine into a meritocracy.

Democracy recognises the competence of doctors without becoming a “medicocracy”. It recruits magistrates by competitive examination without becoming an “examinocracy”. In the same way, Mériquité protects merit without handing it the entire government of society.

2. You have kept merit, but set aside three quarters of the doctrine

The heart of Mériquité is not:

“The best must command the others.”

Its heart lies in four propositions:

1. None is born alone: no one builds themselves without others.

2. None is born free of debt: from what we receive an obligation is born.

3. The community must protect each person’s effort: that is merit.

4. From debt honoured and merit protected, tranquillity is born.

Together these four propositions form the core of the doctrine. Merit is only one component of it.

Remove the debt: you may obtain an arrogant meritocracy, in which the winner ascribes all their success to their own worth alone.

Remove merit: you may obtain a collectivism that confiscates individual effort in the name of the group.

Mériquité refuses both these mutilations.

The debt prevents merit from justifying privilege; merit prevents the debt from denying effort.

That is precisely the relation your contribution does not discuss. Yet one cannot strip a doctrine of its distinctive principle and then reproach it for resembling a different doctrine.

3. Meritocracy ranks; Mériquité protects

In a meritocracy, the principal question is:

“Who deserves to come first?”

In Mériquité, the question is fuller:

“Where did the competitors set out from? What means did they have? What obstacles did they overcome? Were the criteria public? And what does society owe to the person who will never be able to take part in the race?”

Mériquité does not automatically award victory to the one who starts behind. It maintains the requirements of capacity and of result. But it refuses to let the head start received at birth then be presented as proof of personal superiority.

Two pupils, one and the same rule

A crude meritocracy looks only at the two marks.

Mériquité does not abolish marks. It refuses only to erase the conditions under which they were obtained.

It sets merit in context without abolishing competence.

It does not say that the second must automatically be chosen. It says that the advantages received by the first must not be turned into virtues he is supposed to have given himself.

4. The decisive difference: dignity is not earned

Here is the point that suffices, on its own, to overturn the thesis of a “meritocracy in disguise”.

In Mériquité, human dignity, fundamental rights, essential care, justice, security and protection against abandonment never depend upon merit.

— A sick child does not have to earn their care.

— A disabled person does not have to pass a competitive examination in order to be entitled to the protection of society.

— An elderly person who can no longer produce loses neither their rights nor their dignity.

Mériquité sets this absolute limit:

A society that owes nothing to those who can never repay it ceases to be a society; it becomes a market.

A doctrine that removes precisely what is essential in human life from the judgement of merit cannot seriously be described as a meritocracy.

Meritocracy asks what each person deserves to receive according to their performance.

Mériquité affirms that there are things every person must receive, even when they have achieved nothing, simply because they are human.

This is not a difference of vocabulary. It is a fundamental philosophical divergence.

5. The word “meritocracy” was itself popularised as a warning

You would have done well to look into the history of the word.

Michael Young popularised the term “meritocracy” in a satirical work published in 1958. He imagined a society in which merit, summed up as intelligence and effort, ended by producing a new caste.

The winners ascribed their power to their own worth alone. The losers were made morally responsible for their condition.

That is exactly the drift Mériquité fights.

To the one who succeeds it says:

Your work will be recognised, but you have travelled along a road you did not build alone.

To the one who fails it says:

Your failure is not the measure of your worth, and the Nation has no right to abandon you.

It thus fights the two poisons of a meritocracy gone astray: the arrogance of the winner and the humiliation of the loser.

To call this a meritocracy in disguise is to confuse the remedy with the disease because both utter the word “merit”.

6. A doctrine is not an electoral programme

You then ask:

• what economic organisation?

• what property regime?

• what redistribution?

• what health system?

• what education policy?

• what social protection measures?

• what relations between capital and labour?

These questions are legitimate. But they prove no doctrinal incoherence. They reveal a confusion between three different levels:

The doctrine states the permanent principles;

The national project translates those principles into broad institutional, economic and social orientations;

The programme of government turns them into measures, timetables, budgets and indicators.

The founding doctrinal text expressly warns its reader:

“This text is neither an electoral programme, nor a national project, nor a contract for a term of office.”

To reproach a doctrine for not containing all the measures of a programme amounts to reproaching a compass for not supplying the list of petrol stations.

A doctrine points north. The national project maps out the road. The programme chooses the vehicles, costs the fuel and sets the hour of departure.

You are asking the compass to produce the plans of the vehicle straight away. That is a useful question for the next stage, but it is not an argument against the existence of north.

7. Mériquité is not, however, silent on the organisation of society

It already sets out verifiable political orientations.

On the economy, wealth must improve the human condition and enable each person to live with dignity from the fruits of their labour.

On redistribution, Mériquité refuses both the abandonment of the weakest and redistribution carried out by a captured State. It does not wish merely to repair unjust outcomes; it wishes to correct the conditions that produce them.

On education, it affirms equitable means: the person who starts with less must receive the real capacities to exercise their freedom.

On health and social protection, it lays down an unconditional foundation that depends neither upon productivity nor upon merit.

On the State, it assigns three cardinal missions: to protect, to ensure tranquillity and to develop. The State is neither the master of the citizen nor their adversary; it serves the common good.

On property, it holds sacred neither general State ownership nor absolute private property. Legitimate property is protected, but the common goods necessary to the generations that follow cannot be irreversibly alienated.

On natural resources, it regards the subsoil, water, minerals and land as a heritage of which the present generation is not the absolute owner. It may organise their exploitation; it cannot permanently deprive future generations of control over them.

On capital and labour, it protects initiative and investment, but refuses to let ownership of a tool authorise the confiscation of the effort of those who make it work.

On justice, it requires the rule of law, equality before the law, and criteria that are written, public and verifiable for access to public goods and public offices.

That is already a method of judgement and of government.

The precise instruments will then have to be defined, costed, tested and evaluated in the national project and the programme. Mériquité does not claim to replace that work; it indicates the principles that work will have to obey.

8. What is distinctive about Mériquité?

You ask what it truly brings that is new.

The novelty of a doctrine does not mean that none of its words had ever been uttered before it.

— Locke did not invent liberty.

— Marx did not invent solidarity.

— Democrats did not invent the people.

— Ecologists did not invent nature.

No doctrine is born intellectually out of nothing — which, incidentally, already confirms the axiom that none is born free of debt.

Doctrinal originality lies in the problem made central, in the architecture of the concepts and in the consequences drawn from them.

The proposition proper to Mériquité consists in ordering within one and the same relation:

• what the individual owes to the community;

• what the community owes to the individual;

• what the living owe to future generations;

• what every policy must preserve unconditionally: dignity;

• and the lived criterion of collective success: tranquillity.

Meritocracy asks chiefly how to distribute positions among competitors.

Mériquité asks how to receive, judge, improve and hand down a common world without crushing the individual or abandoning the vulnerable.

It is not the same question, nor the same object, nor the same architecture, nor the same purpose.

9. A point of vocabulary

You use the words “Mériquité” and “Mériquitisme” interchangeably.

The second is not the name of our political school.

This clarification is obviously not a substantive answer to your questions. But before examining a doctrine, it is better to begin by leaving it its true name.

10. Let us therefore continue the debate

Dear Sir, I do not reproach you for having asked questions. A doctrine that fears questions is already a dead doctrine.

I note only that you framed your conclusion — “a meritocracy in disguise” — before having correctly reconstructed the object you wished to examine.

You write that you come in peace. I readily believe it.

But in intellectual work, coming in peace does not excuse one from coming with the whole text.

The debate therefore remains open. Mériquité asks not that its word be taken on trust. It asks that it be read in full, that it be confronted with the facts, and that the rules it imposes be judged — including upon those who profess it.

The difference comes down, in the end, to a few words:

I thank you, then, for your contribution. I hope these answers will have enlightened you and will henceforth allow the debate to continue on what Mériquité actually affirms, and not on the truncated version one might be tempted to substitute for it.