Do you think you have a fair chance in life? Do you think that any opportunity is open to you, and you simply need enough talent to seize it? Think again. Society is organised around the systematic denial of equal opportunities to the vast majority of citizens. People from working class backgrounds are relentlessly discriminated against in order to provide enough scope for middle and upper class individuals to permanently secure all of the best jobs. The inept child of wealthy parents has drastically better life chances than the most talented child from a housing project.
 

The irony is that most working class people are accomplices in their own subjugation. They buy into the ludicrous myth that the only thing holding them back is themselves. They are presented with a few examples of working class people making good and they conclude that all is well with the system. They have a National Lottery mentality. ‘It could be you,’ runs the marketing slogan, and millions of working class people dutifully rush out to buy their tickets. It’s beyond their comprehension that although it could be you, it’s close to certain that it won’t be you. Every week, they fall for the same trick. They’re being taxed for their stupidity, for their escapist fantasies, for their inability to understand basic statistics. The powers-that-be don’t maintain their dominance by being foolish. They deploy sophisticated, and not so sophisticated, psychological weapons to deceive the masses. Allowing a lucky few of the working class to succeed is one of their main strategies. It could be you, they whisper like Sirens. But, as with the Lottery, it won’t be.
 

It’s time to wake up. See the game for what it is. Understand what’s really going on. The working class are like the helpless humans in The Matrix, imagining themselves free but in fact in the worst of prisons. The artificial intelligence that controlled The Matrix knew exactly what was required to delude its victims. For ‘controller’ in our society, read middle and upper classes. They are the puppet-masters, the illusionists, the grand deceivers.
 

Since the dawn of time there has been a global conspiracy, and its nature never changes. The conspirators are the rich and powerful and their aim, their only aim, is to maintain their wealth and power indefinitely. Only on the rarest occasions, when their hatred of the masses, their greed and contempt, have reached fantastic proportions (such as in France in 1789 and Russia in 1917), do they slip up. Are they on the cusp of slipping up again? The wealth of some individuals is obscene, and their conspicuous and arrogant spending a constant provocation that will in due course receive an appropriate response.
 

The Meritocracy Party promotes a single rule: that people should be judged entirely on their own merits and not those of their parents or any other individuals or groups with which they may be related or associated. The Family is the anti-meritocratic institution par excellence since it cares only about its own interests regardless of the objective merits of the family members. Parents of inept children will think they have done their job perfectly if they secure wonderful jobs and lifestyles for their unmeritorious offspring. Their ‘accomplishment’ is that they have massively damaged the interests of the state, they have ensured that incompetence is ingrained in society, and they have guaranteed all of the ills from which our nation surely suffers.
 

Taller than average parents tend to have children shorter than they are. Shorter than average parents tend to have children taller than they are. Genius parents tend to have less intelligent offspring. Stupid parents tend to have more intelligent children. Gamblers enjoying fantastic winning streaks tend, in the long run, to lose their winnings. Gamblers, on terrible losing streaks, would, if they were able to continue playing, win back most of their losses. Welcome to the great stabilising force of nature: regression to the mean. Without it, we could breed freak populations of giants and dwarves, humans with the intelligence of gods and others with the intelligence of goldfish. ‘Lucky’ gamblers might win the wealth of nations, and losers, if they could stay in the game, run up national debts. Without regression to the mean, stable society would disintegrate.

Wherever you see regression to the mean seemingly being subverted, you know trouble is near. There’s one element of our society in which regression to the mean is defied to a dizzying degree: wealth. The rich just keep getting richer, and nothing ever reins them back in. Equally, there are billions of poor people on earth who will never acquire any meaningful wealth. How can such an unfair distribution of wealth have come about? How can it be so ruthlessly sustained? It seems to defy all logic. Yet there’s nothing mysterious about it.

In any fair, unrigged system regression to the mean will occur. When regression to the mean is seen not to operate you have certain proof that mechanisms have been put in place to prevent a fair outcome. Capitalist democracy, with the family at its core (for ‘family’ read nepotism and cronyism), is the precise vehicle in the West used to perpetuate unfairness. Meritocracy is the antidote. In a meritocratic society, every family will enjoy its day in the sun. Regression to the mean guarantees it. There will be no more great dynasties wielding their power, wealth and influence for centuries. Don’t you want to have your chance, based on your merit?
 

If wealth could be equated with height then most of us would be the size of ants, while the super rich would be as high as mountains. Do you think that’s healthy? As an ant, you wouldn’t even be able to contemplate the size of the super rich. And they wouldn’t notice if they stood on you and crushed you to death. And, in your heart, aren’t you already aware that you’re invisible to the super rich? They couldn’t care less about you. As far as they’re concerned, you don’t exist. Just as we only notice ants when they crawl over our hand on a hot day, so it is with the super rich and us.
 

Never forget that they didn’t get where they are by talent. They are the beneficiaries of a rigged system. You, by playing along with it, perpetuate it. A word to the wise – wise up, suckers!
 

Imagine a super-rich person going into a luxury restaurant. No one looks at him. No one acknowledges him. No one takes his jacket. No one shows him to his seat. No one offers him a drink. No one gives him a menu. No one serves him any food. If no one does anything for him, his wealth is meaningless. Wealth is an illusion that you choose to reify i.e. to make it solid, tangible. Wealth is nothing more than an arrangement between people. The essence of this arrangement is that poor people choose to accept that they are deficient in this imaginary substance (money). They acknowledge that the wealthy can supply it to them and they eagerly pursue it because then they will become less ‘deficient’. Yet the whole system is merely an elaborate set of transactions in a fantasy currency. The arrangement can be broken at any time if sufficient numbers choose to opt out. The ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes, the most famous of the Cynics, held wealth in contempt. In a world of Diogenes’s, the illusion of wealth would dissolve.
 

But the beneficiaries of the money arrangement – the wealthy – do everything in their power to maintain the illusion. They are the Wizards of Oz, and they aren’t going to let anyone see behind the curtain. If you rejected their arrangement, they would be no different from you. So, don’t blame anyone else for your poverty and their wealth. If you choose to sign up to an arrangement that guarantees you a subservient role, what right do you have to complain? The wealthy are right in concluding that you’re a loser and a failure because only an idiot signs up be a slave when, at any time, he can choose liberty instead.

You should accept the money arrangement only if you get a fair slice of the pie. It’s well known that the vast majority of assets in any country are controlled by a tiny percentage of the population. Why not eat from a different pie, where you get more than a few crumbs. Vote for the Meritocracy Party.
 

Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation (1981) recounts a remarkable aspect of the economy of the former East Germany:

“What writer of science fiction would have 'imagined' this 'reality' of East German factories-simulacra, factories that reemploy all the unemployed to fill all the roles and all the posts in the traditional production process but don't produce anything, whose activity is consumed in a game of orders, of competition, of writing, of book-keeping, between one factory and another, within a vast network. All material production is redoubled in the void. One of these simulacra factories even 'really' failed, putting its unemployed out of work a second time.”

But is this Alice-in-Wonderland situation so different from what we find in the much-vaunted economies of the contemporary West? It’s well known that most employees rarely work for more than fifty percent of their working day. What are they doing for the rest of the time? Sure, they are at work but they aren’t doing anything worthwhile – they’re gossiping, fooling around, doing private stuff on the internet, phoning friends, having cups of coffee, clock watching, worrying about friends and family yada yada.

They are in the same situation as the East Germans, participants in an imaginary production process in which nothing is actually produced. They are paid, and in due course they go out and spend their earnings, and the economy duly flourishes. But doesn’t the suspicion grow that it’s the circulation of money that drives the economy rather than the performance of meaningful work?
 

Maybe the East Germans weren’t crazy. Under the direction of good enough economists, freed from the constraints of communism, their imaginary economy might have succeeded. With good design, efficient technology, widespread robotic automation, effective computerisation, the vast majority of jobs most of us perform could probably be rendered obsolete. Yet with ‘East German’ simulated jobs, the economy could continue much as before without millions of people becoming unemployed. Since money is illusory (if people choose to reject the illusion it has no function at all), why shouldn’t the economy be illusory too? A Nobel Prize in Economics for the first economist to work out the details of Baudrillard’s simulated hyperreal economy – much better than the real thing.

In a sense, there’s nothing other than economics. All of human behaviour can be reduced to basic buying and selling transactions. We’re surrounded by people buying and selling love, sex, beauty, entertainment, fun, pleasure, marriage, parenthood, security, ideas, respectability, normality, spirituality, comfort, sympathy – whatever you can think of. Who’s buying and who’s selling and what price is to be paid is all that’s at issue. This, of course, is the stock in trade of economics.

We’re all shoppers, and we all have our own shop. But if we don’t have much to sell, we won’t be able to buy much. When all the bullshit’s cleared away, isn’t that the story of our lives? 

A huge amount of money has poured into English football in the last few years thanks to spectacular TV deals and huge corporate sponsorship. The paradox is that many clubs are massively indebted – how can a huge club like Leeds United almost go bankrupt? – and ticket prices are rising relentlessly for the fans, to the extent that many working class fans can no longer afford to attend matches.

In a ‘sensible’ market, the influx of money would lead to football clubs being debt free, and ticket prices being held constant, or even reduced, and better facilities being provided at stadiums i.e. clubs and fans would directly benefit from all of the money sloshing around. But that doesn’t happen. Why not? Because football is a market rigged in favour of a tiny number of people in positions of power and influence: the players, agents, managers and executives. These individuals, the beneficiaries of an entirely rigged market where no one is allowed to interfere with their greed, can pay themselves practically all of the money that flows into football. Who’s going to stop them? You?

When people are allowed to pay themselves any amount of money, they invariably do. Moreover, the big, powerful clubs such as Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool are allowed to take a bigger share of the sponsorship and TV deals, ensuring that only they can afford the best players, thus consolidating their elite positions.

Merit? You must be joking. This is a system based on privilege. There’s no fair competition. In fact, there’s no competition at all. The same teams win all of the trophies year after tedious year. Privilege kills competition, kills entertainment, kills merit. Many talented individuals can’t break into teams – can’t get a chance – because clubs want to buy success by signing established players. There must be thousands of players who would have made the grade if the system hadn’t been so rigged. We get to watch a small group of pampered, extravagantly overpaid prima donnas instead of a large group of much less well paid individuals, their skills honed by ferocious competition.

The last thing the super-rich want is competition that threatens their ability to pay themselves whatever they like. That’s why they make sure they deal with small groups of superstars. It’s not that there aren’t plenty of potential superstars out there: the system is only interested in identifying and using a lucky few, and to hell with the rest. It’s time the football cartels were smashed to pieces, proper competition introduced and deserving young footballers given a fair chance.

Oh, if you want a few other examples of anti-meritocratic, rigged industries that use similar tactics to the football world look at TV, Hollywood, the beauty and fashion industry, ‘art’ (Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin style), Popular Music, Newspapers, Private Equity, Finance, Boardrooms. If agents/head hunters/talent spotters/middle men are involved in a particular industry, you can be certain you’re dealing with a rigged system: the parasites would die if they didn’t have fat carcasses to feed off.
 

‘I’m worth a thousand BBC journalists,’ jokes Jonathan Ross. Except we all know he’s not joking. Certainly, a thousand BBC employees have had to be dismissed to scrape together the money to pay his salary. Does he care? Of course not. He’s Jonathan Ross after all…TV personality extraordinaire, merely being paid his ‘market rate’. A rate set by whom? Well, good question. The market? What’s that? I mean, really. Not by the general public – take that as read – but by others who are beneficiaries of inflated and inappropriate market rates. It’s one of the clearest symptoms of the anti-meritocratic society when the staggeringly untalented are paid a fortune and are allowed to believe, like the naked old Emperor, that they are fully clothed in the finest of garments. Has Jonathan Ross ever watched his own programmes? Obviously not. Even he, in his rare moments of truthfulness, might see a fat, middle-aged, bollock-naked man staring back at him. Even those derided thousand journalists aren’t as much of a joke as Ross.
 

How to create a rigged, anti-meritocratic system? Simple. Kill competition. Choose a handful of ‘superstars’ and set their ‘market rate’ to whatever value the system can afford to pay. Whatever you do, don’t flood the market with loads of talented individuals because then their market rate will collapse and you’ll end up with lots of talented people performing at their best for much smaller remuneration. And that’s no good at all, is it?

It should be possible to see whether our society is being systematically manipulated in favour of certain privileged groups. Every year, a list of the 100,000 highest paid individuals in Britain should be published for public scrutiny. Each person should be compelled to reveal a) which school they went to b) which university c) which religion they belong to d) if they belong to any secret societies and, if so, which ones e) any private clubs or organisations they belong to f) if they are related to, or are friends with, anyone else on the list. Of course, those with secrets to hide will not wish to participate in this exercise: secrecy is the best friend of those who wish to rig systems in their favour. In a truly meritocratic system, it would be impossible to find any patterns of bias in the Domesday List. At the moment, it’s certain that huge distortions in favour of the beneficiaries of nepotism/cronyism would be uncovered.