> Canonically in the western world it's usually "gumption" or "intelligence". reply

Emphasis on natural inherence. Meritocracies work if everyone is statistically identical. They even work when everyone is perfectly identical. They don't if every action is independent and identically distributed, but it's not; being lucky in the past can make one more capable in the present even in an unbiased system.

We should keep that randomness in mind to avoid being cruel. But systems that ignore this path dependence, or worse, try to stamp it out, underperform those that acknowledge it.