I think that what is confusing you is there are multiple factors influencing the meritness of meritocracies.
First, what you are getting at - unequal intellect. I will generalize this to "unequal intrinsic traits" -- I will never be a pro NBA player, for example, regardless of how much I want it. My height effectively prevents me from doing so. Some people need significantly less sleep than I do. I worked with someone once who needed ~4 hours a night and was well aware how much this benefited his career/life. He could spend literally 4 hours a day doing whatever he wanted that I cannot, do to me needing more normal sleep. However, my innate intellect does allow me to excel at both technical and people skills, meaning I, like you, am on pace to wildly succeed in my career, watching many struggle and ultimately not know why.
For me what is most interesting is a second factor: capitalizing on opportunity. There is a certain element of opportunity everyone receives, however some people are quite successful at taking advantage of it and others do not. Purely from a financial perspective, we all know coworkers who live similar enough lifestyles to us yet are destined to be broke at 65. They might make the same, live in similar houses, and have nickeled and dimed themselves into negative networth. Similar opportunity, different outcomes.
In many ways I think that the primary benefit my intellect has given me is the ability to capitalize on opportunity that I receive. Oftentimes this is cited as the reason for a more harsh and meritorious society, in that many people who "fail" do in fact have similar opportunities to those who "succeed" but just do not take advantage of them. I actually more or less agree with that sentiment, too, that people who "fail" often do so because they do not take advantage of their opportunities or worse do so poorly enough to make them negative overall.
The question I wrestle with is how much my ability to
capitalize on opportunity is "my ability" (that I've nurtured/developed/grown over my lifetime) vs simply another unequal intrinsic trait. The older I get the more I come to believe a large percentage of even this ability is purely based on my intrinsic personality type.
I'm not really sure of the implications. In some sense whether or lives are "deterministic" or not ultimately cannot matter: not knowing how much of our lives are in/out of our control means we can only live as if they are in our control.
Regardless, it
should drive those of us who are "blessed" or "lucky" or "however you'd prefer to describe your innate abilities in a way that makes you feel superior to others who chose to be less innately good at things" to have compassion for those who do not.
Great points. I especially liked John Rawls' ideas about what kind of society we would want to be born into, if we didn't know what our privileges would be.
I think that in order for a society to be stable, it must be tolerable for everyone. If a basic form of success becomes unobtainable for enough people, that society is headed to a dark place which is bad for everyone. I can see our society heading this way due to technological advances and automation, and I believe that Universal Basic Income is a satisfactory solution which combines the benefits of meritocracy and socialism.
I actually think it is inevitable that either we invent tons of fake-work jobs (think Civilian Conservation Corps types of jobs, which in some sense only delays it) or end up with UBI.