What if the game isn’t rigged because we’re failing — but because we were never meant to win by their rules?
Meritocracy and the Absurd Metrics We Swallow Without Thinking
Merit /ˈmer.ɪt/ (noun): the quality of being particularly good or worthy, especially so as to deserve praise or reward. Meritocracy /ˌmer.ɪˈtɒk.rə.si/ (noun): a system, organization, or society in which people are chosen and moved into positions of success, power, and influence on the basis of their demonstrated abilities and merit — or so the theory goes. a system, organization, or society in which people are chosen and moved into positions of success, power, and influence on the basis of their demonstrated abilities and merit — or so the theory goes.
Once — for a brief, burning season in my early 20s — I thought I might become a legislative representative.
Not because I dreamed of power.
But because I was angry.
Angry at how messy, transactional, and indifferent the government could be.
Angry that basic rights — education, healthcare, transparency — were treated as favors, bartered away like snacks at a political auction.
I was fresh into my international relations degree, still naive enough to think good policy could come from good intentions.
But it didn’t take long to realize: I wasn’t cut out for the game.
Not because I lacked ability — but because I had too much to lose playing chess without privilege.
What I had was rage. What I didn’t have were safety nets. Or a surname. Or someone in the room saying, “I got you.”
And in this game? Rage burns bright. But it doesn’t protect you from the cold.
I used to believe the system worked.
That if I just played the game right — study hard, speak well, perform endlessly — the gates would open.
That I could outwork my way through the bias, dodge the landmines of poverty and expectation, and climb my way out.
I believed in merit.
Until I realized the system doesn’t reward merit. It rewards familiarity, fluency, and compliance — all dressed in the clean white shirt of “professionalism.”
That’s when it clicked.
Meritocracy isn’t fairness. It’s branding.
Whose Merit Are We Even Talking About?
You know what cuts deeper than injustice? Not even realizing the game has a name. We use the word "merit" like it’s neutral, universal, and self-evident. But ask the average student, jobseeker, or even a mid-level manager in Indonesia — and you’ll get blank stares. Because we’ve borrowed the word, but never unpacked its baggage.
“Meritokrasi” isn’t a common part of our public conversation. We don’t talk about how systems reward polish over perseverance. We don’t question the myths behind achievement. Instead, we chase an invisible metric, hoping our struggle eventually earns us a stamp of worth.
Let’s be real: meritocracy isn’t just about being “good” at something.
It’s about being “good” in a way the system can recognize, monetize, and control.
If you happen to write well and do it in perfect academic English, congrats — you’re a “thought leader.”
But if your genius comes with a thick accent, or code-switches between three languages and trauma mid-sentence, it’s labeled unprofessional.
If you memorize the formulas but don’t know how to pretend you’re not poor in the interview, you're “not ready.”
In Indonesian education, we reward students who memorize answers and pick the right multiple-choice options on national exams.
We ignore the kid who fixes her family’s finances at 17, or teaches herself calculus from YouTube because her school lacks a proper teacher.
In the workplace, we evaluate “leadership potential” by how confidently someone presents in meetings — not how quietly they clean up messes left by their louder peers.
So no — we’re not measuring merit.
We’re measuring conformity in a system designed for the already-favored.
Meritocracy Gaslights Us All — But Not Equally
Here’s what stings more than failure: not even realizing the game is rigged.
It convinces the privileged that they’ve earned everything.
And convinces the rest of us that we simply didn’t try hard enough.
Because in Indonesia, we’ve lived in a long-running double bind. One side says, “Work hard, and you’ll go far.” The other mutters, “Nggak punya orang dalam? Ya susah, sayang.”
I used to think the myth of ordal — orang dalam — would fade with the 2010s. That with more education, internet access, and startup culture, we’d finally bury the old stories of backdoor favoritism.
But nope. The ghost still walks — dressed in HR buzzwords and wrapped in selection processes that smell like fairness but taste like favoritism.
We didn’t outgrow it. We just learned how to rebrand it.
Some of us start with polished shoes and GPS navigation.
Others start barefoot, uphill, carrying silence, survival, and stories no one ever asked to hear.
That’s the cruel genius of meritocracy — it gaslights you cleanly:
“If you didn’t succeed, it’s because you didn’t try hard enough.”
As if we all started at the same line.
As if your race wasn’t uphill, in a storm, with a backpack full of inherited debt, grief, and gendered expectations.
Some kids run toward dreams.
Others run from bills, from shame, from a mother’s quiet exhaustion.
Some polish resumes.
Others spend years trying to erase their parents’ names off a debt list.
That’s not ambition. That’s survival — and we’re not allowed to call it merit.
As if effort alone explains why one kid ends up at Universitas Indonesia, and another ends up folding clothes in a mall to pay for her brother’s tuition.
And worse — when you do make it, you question whether you ever really earned it.
Or whether you just got really, really good at the performance:
The voice modulation, the polite hustle, the right kind of adversity that wins applause without making people uncomfortable.
Meritocracy doesn’t demand excellence from the marginalized. It demands palatability.
Not to be brilliant — just tolerable enough not to scare the room.Zohran Mamdani and the Myth of “Deservingness”
I think of Zohran Mamdani — New York State Assemblyman, democratic socialist, child of immigrants, unapologetically brown, deeply principled, and he's around my age!
He refused to say he’d visit Israel in his first act as mayor — not because he’s against diplomacy, but because he saw the question for what it was: a loyalty test wrapped in the language of foreign policy. A test of obedience disguised as a test of values. And he said no.
They came for him, not because he lacked intelligence or clarity or courage — but because he wouldn’t play the game. He didn’t smile through contradiction. He didn’t package his politics for comfort. He refused to contort his ethics into something marketable.
He’s what meritocracy doesn’t know how to categorize: principled, competent, and unbought.
So the system labels him “dangerous.”
And here’s what terrifies me — because I’ve seen this story before.
Because every time someone challenges the formula — someone refuses to choose palatability over principle — the system sharpens its knives.
I worry that they will try to silence him, sideline him, smear him. Not for being wrong — but for being uncompromising. Because he's disrupting something bigger than just policy: he's disrupting the illusion that power rewards truth.
And yet, for the first time in a long time, someone like him gives me hope.
Even from across the ocean, in a country who doesn't even speak my mother-tonged language.
Because his fight — to make politics a place for truth, not just performance — reminds me that we're not crazy for wanting more.
He reminds me that it’s not naïve to demand ethics in politics.
It’s necessary.
And maybe we won’t win by their rules.
But people like Zohran are rewriting what winning even means.
We Don’t Need More Seats at Their Table — We Need New Tables
I’m not anti-effort. I’m not here to glamorize mediocrity.
I love seeing people excel — for real.
But I also know that brilliance grows in harsh soil.
And too often, we ignore the brilliance that doesn’t look like shiny degrees or polished LinkedIn pages.
Meritocracy pretends it’s objective.
But it’s not.
It’s just a story told by the powerful to keep themselves on top — and to keep the rest of us grateful for scraps and opportunities wrapped in impossible expectations.
So no — I don’t want your seat at the table if I have to starve myself of authenticity to earn it.
I don’t want to wear your suit, speak your sanitized tongue, or bow at the altar of “neutral professionalism.”
Let’s build our own damn table.
One where we measure grit differently.
Where resilience counts. Where rage has grammar. Where kindness isn't a weakness.
And where worth isn’t decided by how perfectly we mimic the people who never had to prove themselves in the first place.
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