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Comment by ikeyany | Hacker News Reader

The appearance of a meritocracy is necessary so that people don't get discouraged and stop working hard. Almost every large organization acts as if things are fair, otherwise morale would plummet.

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The problem is... the theatre is dissolving.

Not the problem. The problem is that it is not egalitarian

The thread hypothesis is that egalitarianism is a merely instrumental value, which we pursue (or perhaps pretend to pursue) in order to keep the workers working. If this theatre dissolution led to less egalitarianism but workers working yet more mindlessly, then that would be fine. You might disagree, but in that case your disagreement should be lodged further upthread.

It surely appears that way.

However, if you had to prognosticate, how will admissions at elite institutions look like 12-15 years from now, after all the dust had settled?

More of the same (since people have short memories & outrage is short-lived)? or genuine change for the better?

edit: grammar

Then we need either better lies or a better reality.

Can I vote, personally, for the better reality?

Probably not through voting. But direct action can get you to a better reality.

Unfortunately, all the proposed routes for a better reality start off by heading through a worse one, and no one's really made the trip successfully yet. But people still talk about the utopia just a little bit farther than the previous group went...

Absolutely. A good start is calling out injustice when you see it.

The system is unfair.

We want people to participate in this unfair system, so we tell them the system is fair.

I understand what you’re saying, but to me the obvious answer is to stop supporting this old unfair system.

That's not realistic for most people. If you don't participate, you go broke. If you're broke, you have no power or voice of real consequence in our society.

I want to work to build parallel power that can help others exit capitalism or dramatically reduce how much they rely on it.

Those people exist among us and they're called homeless people.

But less glibly, I bet you would find many such people in this thread.

It’s easy to find people who want to exit capitalism. I find them all the time. But I want to work to build institutions that will help people do that, at least to a large degree even if not entirely.

To fix the problem of capitalism, you would have to fix the problem of pricing (=efficient allocation of) goods into supply chains, which problem grows as the fourth power of the number of goods available.

It's probably better to keep making our current system more transparent and work for prices to better reflect society's values than to "exit capitalism".

In our deeply flawed society, "pretends to be" can precede a whole slew of things in so many contexts.

For example, the Web pretends to be secure. Universities pretend to be different than for-profit corporations. And so on...

Sad.

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