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I grew up in a society where merit didn't really matter, most of the time. Regardless of you finished just primary school or you went to college, your expected income in the job assigned by the state (that matched your educational status) would pay mostly the same. Only if you ended up being a director at a (state run) factory or were higher positioned in The Party would you have significantly more benefits (financial and otherwise). To my mind, that society sucked. It meant that passion, time, obsession wasn't being appreciated. The way the state was treating it was just one aspect of it but it had huge trickle down implications for the rest of the society. It meant that people with 4 classes didn't need to respect those with college, it created this perverse inverse set of values where to spend more time studying and doing things was seen as a sign of weakness, of stupidity, the "smart" people would study or do the least amount of work and "trick" their way to success. As the state assigned you your job, with extremely low risk to lose it (you would have had to be caught stealing, repeatedly) there was no incentive to work hard in your line of work. As you can imagine, if most everyone doesn't do serious work and try to "trick" their way into everything, you don't get a very competitive economy, which had negative consequences for everyone. The repercussions of that are still felt in the country I grew up today, the value system of older generations hasn't changed. When they see a young person that got hired at am multinational company buy a shiny new foreign car, old retired people talk behind their back saying "who knows how much that young person stole" to get that car (or worse, if the young person is a young lady). When someone does anything extraordinary, the normal reaction isn't to congratulate or praise them, or to show them as an example to be followed, the natural reaction is to be envious and to suggest unsavory ways that could explain their success, because after all, like the state said a long time ago, everyone is equal. It is a shitty, miserable society, rotten to its core that I wish nobody else would experience in their life. |