In a Society Ready for Socialism and Anarchy, a Coherent Meritocracy May Be the Less Sexy but Preferable Solution
By Andi Mazingo, Esq.
I try not to frequent social media feeds, but when I do, I tend to post commentary on big tech. Like the pretend “campaign” I ran for OpenAI’s non-existent Chief Ethics Officer position about a year ago—satire on the organization’s undemocratic processes and performative ethics.
The algorithms read my behavior instantly: this one is angry at power. My feeds now are organized around socialists and anarchists, and the message is unmistakable. We are slaves to capitalism and we must subvert power. The messaging is a nice contrast from my day-to-day, because it signals an underlying truth usually ignored: late-stage capitalism and late-stage democracy have stopped delivering on their promises to most people, and our structures are degraded and approaching collapse.
I want to be clear before I say anything else: the anger is earned. The doctrines collecting rage are not frivolous. They are diagnosing truths: rights are being violated at scale and the needs of ordinary people are not being met by institutions that exist, ostensibly, to meet them. When I sit with that rage, I do not find myself wanting to talk anyone out of it.
What I want to do instead is ask where it goes next. Because the honest historical record is that righteous anger, on its own, does not build a better system. It builds a vacuum, and something fills the vacuum.
The revolution becomes the regime
I should be precise about what I mean, because “socialism” now covers everything from Nordic social democracy to revolutionary state planning. I am not talking about mixed economies that pair markets with a strong welfare state — many of those work, and they work precisely because they kept democratic accountability intact rather than concentrating power in the name of the people. I mean the revolutionary impulse to seize and centralize that power on behalf of the dispossessed, and what tends to happen to it afterward.
Socialism's tragedy is not that its diagnosis was wrong. It is that the movement so often became the thing it rose to destroy. Bolshevik idealism hardened into Stalinist machinery. A Venezuelan project that began by channeling real grievances over real inequality ended in authoritarian collapse. Even closer to home, labor movements built to protect workers have, in their worst chapters, been hollowed out by their own corruption and self-dealing. Different scales, different geographies, the same arc.
We are watching a domestic version of the dynamic in real time. Someone feeds on the legitimate fury of a class whose needs have gone unmet—and then, having ridden that fury into power, turns around and exploits the very people who carried them there. The person who instigates the anger and the person who profits from it turn out to be the same person.
The through-line is not “anger is bad.” The through-line is that any movement which fails to build accountability into the structure of its own power will reproduce the corruption it displaced. The goodness of the people at the top is not a control system. It never has been, because we’re humans. The moment the architecture depends on the character of whoever holds the keys, you have already lost.
So when I ask whether the answer is to shift toward socialism, my answer is not a reflexive no. It is a more uncomfortable question back: are we sure the system we actually need to overhaul is capitalism—or is it the thing capitalism claims to run on?
We have never actually had a meritocracy
Here is the claim I have come to, and I hold it with conviction: what we call meritocracy today is a counterfeit. It does not select for merit. It selects for loyalty to existing power, for social fluency inside that power, and for the willingness to make one’s superiors look good. It dresses that selection up in the language of excellence, and most people never notice the substitution.
I see it from an unusual vantage point. I am an employment lawyer, and a meaningful part of my practice is representing the people that big technology companies push out. They share a profile that has become impossible for me to un-see. They tend to be unusually talented—often the most technically capable people in the room. They also tend to be the ones who didn’t massage the social and political structures the way they were expected to. They raised the compliance concern instead of staying quiet. They flagged the regulatory exposure, the human-rights cost, the thing the company was about to do that it had been explicitly warned not to do. They were neurodivergent in ways that read, to the institution, as poor “communication” or insufficient “fit”—subjective faults that became the stated reason for their removal, when the real reason was that they did not perform belonging—or that their neurotype made performing it too intolerable to bear.
I recognize this profile from the inside, because I share it. I am an autistic attorney, diagnosed midway into my legal career, and I have written before about what it costs to think in systems inside institutions that were not built for it—and what becomes possible when you stop masking and define for yourself what it means to thrive. The traits the institution reads as friction are, in the research, the same traits that make this profile valuable: hyperfocus, pattern recognition, structural intuition, and a systemizing commitment to fairness that produces unusually strong ethical and compliance instincts. That last one is the trap. Neurodivergent employees are statistically more likely to flag misconduct and push for compliance—and stereotypes make it easy for an employer to recast that productive, risk-mitigating behavior as confrontational or insubordinate, and to remove them for it.
This is not a story about lowering the bar. It is a story about the bar measuring the wrong thing. The companies that have actually built strengths-based programs for this talent—JPMorgan Chase, SAP—report neurodivergent employees outperforming their neurotypical peers, in JPMorgan’s case by as much as 140 percent. A system that discards measurable, documented high performance because it arrives in an unfamiliar social register is not a meritocracy struggling to function. It is a meritocracy that was never measuring merit.
And I have watched the other profile thrive. Technically competent, sometimes genuinely so—but rewarded above all for being the loudest and most popular voice, for loyalty that never causes friction, for comfort in claiming credit for work that was not theirs and benefit from labor that was not fairly compensated. It is a profile that, statistically, looks a particular way, and is ever so comfortable receiving more credit than is due. That is who the current system promotes. Not because the system is broken, but because it is working exactly as designed. It was simply never designed to measure merit.
Why this is suddenly urgent
For most of history this was an injustice we could absorb. The people punished by false meritocracy still existed inside the institution; they were under-promoted, not erased.
That margin is closing. Companies are now explicitly thinning large segments of their workforce, with AI-assisted selection increasingly in the loop, and Meta has been among the first to move openly at scale. We do not have to guess at what the counterfeit selects for, because its leadership has begun saying the quiet part out loud. When the CEO of one of the world’s most influential workplaces named the selection criterion out loud, in the same breath as a workforce reduction, that is not a stray sound bite. It is a rare moment of visibility. I wrote at the time about the legal exposure those remarks create—but the deeper point is cultural: a tone at the top that prizes aggression and conformity will, predictably, alienate the highest-performing and most innovative people, the very ones who drive the work. When the flattening comes, the question of who remains is handed entirely to whatever selection system the institution already runs. If that system is a counterfeit meritocracy—one that keeps the loyal and the loud and discards the truth-tellers—then we are about to encode the counterfeit into permanence, at machine speed, with no one left inside to object.
This is the window. Right now, before the flattened employee structures fully harden, we still get to decide what kind of corporation comes out the other side. After, it may be too late to fix.
A recalibrated hierarchy
So I do not think the answer is to flatten hierarchy and disperse merit into nothing. “Everyone is equal” is an oversimplification of what the moment actually requires. We still need the most capable people in the world working on the largest problems. That has not changed.
What has to change is what earns power within the structure. A real meritocracy would still reward technical excellence—and it would refuse to reward it alone. It would measure, and promote on, the capacity to steward: coherence, humanity, and the ethical courage to tell a costly truth. The people I most want to build with are exactly those who carry technical brilliance and a refusal to abandon coherence under pressure. In the current system those two traits are in tension, because honoring coherence gets you removed. In a real meritocracy they would be the same currency.
That requires real structural change, not a values statement. Consider how most companies handle ethics today. They hire ethicists, and then give them no leverage—none over product and user-experience decisions, none over how the workforce is treated. The people hired to protect human welfare are structurally barred from influencing the decisions that determine it. The result is not ethics. It is liability theater: performative, predictably ineffective, and fundamentally incoherent. An institution that says it values one thing and is architecturally incapable of acting on it is not confused. It is lying, and the lie is built into the org chart. Politics aside, we should all be able to agree this sort of incoherence is bad.
The fix is to make moral accountability load-bearing—to intertwine the hierarchy with moral good, so that authority over consequential decisions sits with people who can be held to the institution’s stated values, and can be challenged when they drift from them. Less concentration of unaccountable power. More dispersion of contestable power.
You cannot will this into being. You have to build it.
This is where I have to be honest about the limits of every essay like this one, including this one. You do not get a coherent meritocracy by declaring that merit should mean something better. Declarations are exactly what we already have—every company has values on the wall. The gap is not in aspiration. It is in enforceability.
That gap between what an institution says it values and what it can be made to honor is the reason I helped start the Institutional Coherence Initiative. The questions it exists to make answerable are mundane and decisive: Who actually holds authority over a high-impact, AI-mediated decision? What has to be documented? When does the process pause? Who is allowed to challenge the result, and against what record?
None of that is glamorous, and I would rather describe it plainly than sell it. A century ago, the response to financial abuse was not a statement of values; it was infrastructure that made financial accountability verifiable—audits, evidence chains, records someone could later demand and contest. Corporations cannot simply cook the books today not because their executives grew more virtuous, but because the architecture stopped depending on their virtue. The decisions that determine who gets hired, promoted, and let go need the same treatment: a way to reconstruct and challenge them after the fact, so that “we valued fairness” becomes a claim someone can actually check.
And so the prescription is concrete: corporations deploying AI agents in consequential decisions need to integrate a standardized, public, democratically derived, and continually refined coherence layer into those decisions, and publish the audits it produces. A layer like this is worth nothing unless the standards it enforces are developed in the open rather than handed down by my decree or sold from behind a vendor’s paywall, revised as evidence comes in, and contestable by the people they affect (indeed, for many corporations, by humanity at large). Infrastructure that any one party can quietly shape is not accountability. It is the old problem in new language.
The connection to everything above is direct. A counterfeit meritocracy survives because its real selection criteria are hidden, undocumented, and unchallengeable. The moment employment decisions—who is hired, promoted, retained through an AI-enabled decisionmaking—have to pass through standards that are public, democratically developed, logged, and contestable, the counterfeit stops being free. Coherence in employment decisionmaking is not a mood. It is what you get when compliance with auditable, publicly accountable standards makes it costly to keep rewarding loyalty and punishing truth. That is how merit gets redefined in practice rather than in principle.
The less sexy answer
I understand why infrastructure loses the feed to revolution. Revolution is thrilling. It has villains and a clean break and the promise that this time the right people will be in charge. Auditable decision records and escalation thresholds and contestability pathways will never trend.
But the boring answer is the one that does not depend on the right people being in charge—which is precisely why I trust it more. Every revolution I named earlier failed at the same point: it concentrated power and prayed for virtue. Infrastructure does the opposite. It assumes power will be tempted to drift, and it builds the pause, the record, and the challenge before the drift becomes permanent.
We are not choosing between an exciting future and a dull one. We are choosing between a future where the counterfeit meritocracy gets automated into something we can no longer argue with, and one where we built the accountability layer while we still could. A truly coherent meritocracy is the less sexy option. I am increasingly convinced it is the preferable one—and that the window to build it is open now, and closing.
The Institutional Coherence Initiative is building open, auditable governance infrastructure for high-impact AI decisions in institutions.
Further reading by the author, published in Law360: Imagine the Possibilities of Openly Autistic Lawyering and Zuckerberg's Remarks Pose Legal Risk for Meta Amid Layoffs.