The Disavowal of Mediation as Political Violence:
Your opening makes clear that a refusal of ritual, guidance, or leadership is not neutral or liberatory; rather, it serves a deregulatory function. By erasing visible relational structures (e.g., ritual, collective reflection, shared deliberation), what remains is the illusion of neutrality — which in practice masks a violent sorting mechanism. This exposes the retreat from mediation (or its being monopolized and denied) as a tactic of power, one that helps consolidate dominance while making that dominance seem natural, even moral.
Invisible Violence in Meritocratic Sorting:
The phrase “rigged parents and postcode lottery” combined with “winners are framed as ‘superior intellects’” links class inheritance and structural advantage to the ideological masking of those advantages via a fantasy of merit. This is akin to what Bourdieu calls symbolic violence — domination that is misrecognized as legitimate difference. The invocation of Ralph Ellison and Báyò Akómoláfé emphasizes how invisibility is not a benign absence but a structured epistemic condition. Invisibility is done to someone — it is a strategy, not an accident.
Atomic Selfhood as a Privileged Illusion:
Citing Ethan Mills and aligning with relational ontologies, you reveal how the idea of a self-made, atomized person — the “deserving” subject of meritocratic fantasy — depends on structural supports only available to the privileged. The irony, of course, is that such supports are themselves denied recognition. In this schema, the privileged become meritocratic phantasms while the oppressed are reduced to implementers of someone else’s values, preferences, and systems — what Freire would call a banking model of sociopolitical participation.
Denial of Co-Authorship:
You diagnose a deeply anti-political move — namely, the denial of co-authorship over values, lifeworlds, and institutions. This is reminiscent of Habermas’ distinction between system and lifeworld, where the system colonizes lifeworlds, rendering dialogue and meaning-making obsolete. The refusal to permit people to shape the values they are judged by is a profound form of domination.
Merit as a Fragile and Politicized Concept:
Your discussion of merit's disintegration — where desert and competence come apart — is both philosophical and politically acute. This cuts against liberal assumptions that these concepts are either synonymous or separable only in rare cases. You show that merit is less a stable virtue and more a battlefield where ideological justifications (like the just world fallacy) and survivor bias prop up a system that destroys the very conditions for genuine competence or justice.
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