https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/the_end_of_merit.html
Everywhere we look, the principle of merit is compromised or regarded as the worst form of unfairness. Sanctioned mediocrity is now the order of the day. Standards of achievement are diluted, hard work goes unacknowledged, and the desire to excel in one’s field or to accept responsibility for one’s actions and even for one’s failures is in abeyance. Individual talent, intelligence, entrepreneurial success, and personal discipline are dismissed as unjust advantages deriving from the exploitation of the dispossessed. “You didn’t build that,” as Obama notoriously proclaimed. The inevitable result is the devitalizing of political, intellectual, and professional life to the point where a society finds itself in a state of “progressive” deterioration.
Examples abound.
The American (and Canadian) university system is in precipitous freefall, filled with students largely incapable of scholarly ability and civil decorum, professors who do not or cannot teach, gender studies mavens who pollute the curriculum with feminist groupthink, administrators infected by political correctness who propagate “hate speech” laws and shut down controversial debate, and so-called “diversity officers” inimical to diversity of ideas. In effect, the university has opened its doors, in the name of affirmative action, student empowerment, and equity hiring, to a cohort of self-righteous incompetents and mischief-makers. The consequence is predictable. The weak and the undeserving profit at the expense of the shrinking cadre of the committed and the qualified, and society is the worse for it.
Journalism, once a respected profession, has lost its reason for existence, having scrapped its mandate to report on events and to act as public watchdog. Instead, it devotes itself to dishing up propaganda, fake news, and outright lies. Media outlets hire not journalists in the established sense, but journolists, partisan peons poorly trained in linguistic proficiency and utterly devoid of ethical standards. Those who depend on the media for information are thus systematically deceived, leading to a further coarsening of public cognition.
Similarly, our various welfare organizations and government departments, originally conceived as a social safety net, have violated their founding impetus and have come instead to celebrate failure and ineptitude. The ambulance network in drug-infested Vancouver, for example, is too busy responding to its constituency of addicts to provide prompt service to tax-paying citizens. Municipal authorities are dedicated to saving those mired in the throes of self-abuse while ignoring the rightful claimants to paid for social services.
