The first point to make when writing about meritocracy is that it should be understood as multigenerational meritocracy. By adopting the adagium “my grandchildren can become anything they want and hope and strive for” socialism and communism – and the woke version of “equity” – are ruled out. And even radical feminism, since “mothers as nurturing mothers” are required in this political model. Max Verstappen became the formula 1 champion after his father failed but did marry a female car racer producing the ultimate genetics for a champion.

Robots and AI
In the age of LGBTQ+ and the discussions about women’s sports we may observationally at least note that one of the effects of women’s sports is that elite males and females get to meet and party and have babies. The other role of course is that women’s sports offers to women the same as male sport to males: a pacifistic way to compete physically or “hunt” (that’s even why wild animals are called “game” in the English language). It offers a way to have fun and a way to be healthy. It offers an endless pass-time for a future in which robots and AI will do most of the labor (serependitously delivering Marx’ ideal of freedom from boring work as well aka an end to “work slavery”).

American Dream
Acknowledging that meritocracy is not for individuals, but for families we completely destroy the ambitions of communism and socialism (and it’s offspring globalism) to put the state where the family should be. It is the pragmatic and realistic way to accommodate for limits to achievement that can only be overcome in the multigenerational space by families and individuals that stick up for one another. Using the American Dream as an analogy it makes sense that firstly my grandparents have to legally immigrate into the USA before my parents can get a basic education and become real Americans, and then I can go to college or strike it big as an entrepreneur. It is desirable that the primacy of culture (and advancement) are the family, and friendships and other bottom up social structures.

Big boobs
If we understand meritocracy in this multigenerational way, it naturally limits the mandate of the state to intervene on behalf of the downtrodden and against the privileged (who happen to already be 2nd or 3rd generation on the meritocracy ladder). Multigenerational meritocracy maps the truth about nurture and nature: it acknowledges the power of both. Had Jos Verstappen married a pretty waitress with big boobs rather than a car racer, the world would be without Max (yes we can interpret the name chosen for their son as an intended pun). At the same time we acknowledge that nature is all about beauty and sex (more so than about car racing) and that for the foreseeable and unforeseeable future beauty will remain one of the strongest forces in procreation.

Meritocracy an sich
The word meritocracy comes from Michael Young’s book “The rise of the meritocracy” published in 1958 (Young died in 2002). The inventor of this political category thought of it in a negative way since in his view the meritocracy would undermine and destroy the social fabric of society. In my words he thought that in an aristocracy (why do people keep idealising this form of statehood?) the elite learns to be humble towards and connected to the masses, whereas in a meritocracy the elite will become as separate as the predestined elite in Protestantism. For sure, for eternity there have been those elite building forces in society. Nothing new under the sun. But there also always have been (populist) revolutionary forces trying to topple the old elite. New elites guide society in a new direction. In that sense it can never not be Plato’s Philosopher King. Any system or organism is guided by the brain. Well, to some extent also by the reproductive organs, but those are meritocratic (darwinistic) an sich.

Trumpism
I’m writing this essay in a time where a new American elite, a Trumpist elite, has totally chosen to replace affirmative action by merit. DEI is finished. No more plane crashes and wild fires because of incompetent DEI appointments. The DEI candidate Kamala Harris would have guided us straight into world war 3. There is a reason why a merit based system is more peaceful than a power-grab based system: in the modern world of instant global communication talent gets you further than violence. The other thing that the Trumpists are throwing under the bus is ESG and the climate religion. It’s a move back to Christianity (as the spiritual foundation for a regional power base) and mainly to common sense.

Completely bonkers
We need a lot of common sense to get rid of another evil political philosophy: ethnocentrism or ethnonationalism. Societies and political structures will ultimately fail when they are built on false beliefs and a repression of free speech that would expose the falsehoods. National-Socialism was successful in the 30’s as JFK attested to when he visited Germany in those years, but the rot and ultimate failure and destruction of the system was already a given seeing that the German nation was repressing free speech and killing political opponents and was completely bonkers with a ridiculously unscientific quasi-religion of race.

Miscreant
The best parody of the lunacy of the Germans can be seen in the beginning of Roberto Begnini’s film La Vita e Bella. A Berlinese photographer participated in a contest for a photo of the most Aryan baby in Germany. He submitted a photo of a jewish baby and won! Curious and open as I am I have looked around current ethnonationalist circles a bit and found them to be totally ridiculous. There are gatherings of sickly obese cretinous would-be intellectuals lauding the master race. I heard one such German miscreant unfolding a whole theory how it would be scientifically true that when a German baby is born on German soil how an eternal mythical connection would form. At the end of his talk I asked him whether that would not also be true for a baby born of Turkish parents in a Turkish quarter of Frankfurt. He frowned and didn’t know how to respond of course.

These people are here
It could be true that certain elements have historically tried to replace the white race in Europe by people from other races. It could be true that that was or is a very sinister plot. Soros is still alive so we know subversion can happen. But if that happened in recent history, it is still history and we have to deal with it currently. It’s OK to be a bit melancholic about things in the past, but it’s not OK to try to build an anti-human political movement based on it. Does it really matter weather Europe racially got mixed up by a fall of an empire, by war or by a conspiracy? If it happened it happened and now these people are here.

Pim Fortuyn was Trump avant la lettre
It is one thing to have an option to expel criminals and murderers back to their countries of origin. It’s a whole another thing to dream about segregating and purifying a country racially. No matter what problems South-Africa currently has, the Apartheid system was an ugly dragon of a political system. And is there really a need or a benefit to such a radical solution? As a Christian (or at least granting some positive value to christian ethics) and a democrat and a humanist one cannot reach another conclusion than that we have to do it with the people who are currently here. As the great Pim Fortuyn said: everyone who is in, is a Dutch citizen, but immigration will be curbed now. He saw that the Dutch society had reached its limits of uptake and that the replacement should be stopped. He got shot on the eve of becoming the Dutch prime minister. He would have been Trump avant la lettre.

No bullshit, everybody rich
The great Dutch comedians Van Kooten and De Bie said with their Jacobse and Van Es parody political party: “Geen gezeik iedereen rijk” (“No bullshit, everybody rich”). If you think about it that is really the only role of government if we add in some public health, peace, stability and law and order (including a clean environment which is just an aspect of law and order). The Chinese call it “common prosperity” and they don’t care whether the political system is autocratic as long as everybody get’s richer in the end. The Chinese New Years greeting is “Hope you get rich!” The environmental Kuznets curve teaches us that the environment will be clean once the people get rich. And many other things will clear up as well. Even racial tensions. In that sense it should be “No bullshit, let everyone be rich – including the people of foreign origin”.

Liberal tradition
After decades of ideology driven politics we grossly underestimate the extent to which in a capitalist meritocratic system everybody can get filthy rich. With a splash of “own nothing and be happy”, because does it really matter living in a big city whether you own a car or a self driving shuttle picks you up and drops you off? After decades of senseless war and environmental scams and foreign aid scams – and the associated money printing – we can’t begin to think how rich we all could be with common sense politics (and Bitcoin!). We need a two party system (team A and team B) where both parties have the same brilliant slogan “No bullshit, everybody rich”. And from a western standpoint the liberal tradition of free speech and individual rights (to be gay or buddhist or whatever) would a a nice to have and will probably be beneficial to faster prosperity too (as the American experiment proves).

Crisscrossing China
People who still have some nostalgia about race, people or nation, might interject: “But the Chinese are racially pure or the Japanese or the Koreans!” I will maintain that that is not a pro or contra for becoming rich. That that is a contingent outcome of history but not a fundamental. The Chinese used to be so poor that nobody cared to move there. They also looked to make their population smaller, so it never made sense for them to have an immigration policy. Of course nowadays in a meritocratic way thousands of westerners are crisscrossing China to join the economic boom, but it’s true that for now the racial, national homogeneity of those countries is miraculous compared to the west.

Brave new world
But will that remain that way? South-Korea is demographically imploding. Women get 0,6 children on average. Will they keep rejecting immigration? Famously Inuit people invited guests to sleep with their women. In order to stave of inbreeding. In the end the biology finds the smartest solutions. What will the Koreans and the Chinese do once their populations start to implode fast? It’s too early for the mechanical breeding machines that featured prominently in Aldous Huxleys “Brave new world”. On the other hand it makes sense that we will have them within 500 years. Picking sperm and eggs from a catalogue would already be possible. It’s not too far off before that will become socially acceptable. Sex robots are coming, which to many males (and females?) will be a very attractive thing to get through life in a satisfied way.

Toxic people
In recent years paleo-anthropology has underwent a revolution. The old view of a linear progression from ape to homo sapiens has completely been revised. Within that world view some idiots are still maintaining that the white race would somehow be higher than other races. This is very sad because wherever supremacy rears its ugly head we see tragedies occurring like back then with the indigenous people in the America’s, like with South-African apartheid, and right now with the Palestinians in Gaza and the westbank. I know that the saddest examples of modern day racial ideologues sometimes share photo’s of clearly degenerated people from dark races. If I send them an image of a degenerated white person, I get no answer. And surely I have banned such toxic people from my life since they clearly have traded logical reasoning for a very dangerous only-downside ideology.

Racially fluid
The current paradigm in paleoanthropology is that species of homo have always kept on interbreeding. We now know that the Neanderthals split in a western and an eastern population. The western population was highly interbred with homo sapiens. Then the neanderthals vanished (yes we are a genocidal species gradually on the way to better ethics) leaving 4% of their genes in the European DNA. But also homo erectus and homo heidelbergensis kept interbreeding also with sapiens. At the moment we don’t even know anymore where we came from. It all happened at the same time in many places and everything remained racially, genetically fluid.

Large scale hooligan violence
I would maintain that a new global meritocracy in a world that has become a village (traveling from New York to Japan is closer now than Munich to Berlin in the old days) will inevitably lead to new widespread mixing of peoples. Like Brazil! And with world peace (upheld by a multipolar power structure) the multigenerational meritocracy will allow every talent to surface. Why should an African soccer talent not move to Amsterdam and play for Ajax? And marry a Dutch girl and create a new family tradition? To go one step further with this thought experiment: what would happen if ethnonationalist idiots would come to power and force Dutch born Ajax players from foreign parents out of the country? That would lead to large scale hooligan violence since no Ajax fan would accept that such a talent would be expelled. That would be February strike all over again.

Only one planet?
Will the past immigration lead us inevitably on a further decline? With pessimism and a false ideology yes, but with optimism and common sense no. The more people the better. If we can maintain law and order and provide good education, multigenerational meritocracy (social darwinism?) will do the rest. Integration takes multiple generations. Meritocracy takes multiple generations. Getting rich takes multiple generations. But with team A, team B common sense politics with only one ideology “make everybody rich and comfortable” societies will progress not to utopia but to ever greater accomplishments, soon on a second planet as well: Mars. Because that’s one of those stifling environmental lies of course: we have only one planet. Duhhhh!

Herakleitos
Once Musk succeeds to establish an embryo society on Mars, we are on to the next level. In a few hundred thousands of years those Martians will have evolved into a subspecies of homo that will still interbreed with us down here going towards a future where in a few millions years we will not even know what evolution will make of us. In that future how will people living then look at ideologues from our time trying to keep The Netherlands for “The Dutch”? Currently the Dutch cling to Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet (the totally racist Black Peter figure, that wouldn’t be accepted in any other country) but that figure is barely 200 years old. Herakleitos taught us that everything is in flux. How silly and childish in the 21st century is an ethnonationalist? If such people had any talent and a halfway logical brain they would choose the historically open philosophy of multigenerational meritocracy.

Beautiful
My grandchild can be anything! Isn’t it beautiful when an African living in the bush can move to an African city, marry a smart woman and dream the dream that his grandson will be a heart surgeon or a hotshot consultant or a successful marathon runner in Amsterdam?