At some point ideology meets reality and that's when things begin to crumble.
If we construct society and organizations as if merit is not a highly important parameter in achievement, wealth, and success - and instead rely on cosmetics, as if this were inconsequential, then we'll see erosion in all factors which deem a nation or organization successful.
Totally agree. It's unfortunate though that evaluating merit is so dependent on culture. To me, proving what is and isn't merited feels very similar to proving which programming language should be selected for a project. Except for some very rare scenarios you will find yourself dealing with soft reasoning, and the arguments you construct will depend on the audience you are trying to convince. Perhaps this is a problem of my own, but along this vein I find myself producing different proposal documents depending on whether I will be presenting to a developer, manager, or 3rd party team.
My belief in there being some major cultural influence on people's reasoning of the connection of their ideology to reality is what gives me some sympathy and belief in arguments from people I almost always disagree with, namely proponents of fixes to systemic * ism. I typically disagree with them on the definition of systemic * ism and the correct fix to the systemic * ism. I believe (with some evidence) the inputs to the system produce the disparity to a much larger extent than the individual components of the system being * ist and as such I believe we should work to correct the inputs rather than altering the components. And when people do propose changing components of the system, I find it does often come at the cost of beneficial things like merit. I think that the people proposing these ideas don't necessarily dislike the ideas the system is based on, but rather than have a dislike of some transitively caused property of the system, propose the most obvious fix to it, and then fail to consider further than first order effects of their change (ex: removing merit resulting in lower quality output). And this is why I consider myself a skeptical progressive: I think the cause of fixing systemic * ism is good, but I think the currently proposed solutions are damaging.
I think people who believe everyone who disagrees with them are deplorable would be surprised at the results of sitting down and talking with them. Perhaps the internet is just a bad medium for this.
If we construct society and organizations as if merit is not a highly important parameter in achievement, wealth, and success - and instead rely on cosmetics, as if this were inconsequential, then we'll see erosion in all factors which deem a nation or organization successful.