Prove the company’s meritocracy is a story, and you’ll find out what the story was holding up.
Suppose you work somewhere that calls itself a meritocracy, and after a few years you can see that it isn’t one. Promotions go to whoever makes the boss look good, while the people doing the quiet work that keeps the place running stay where they are. Most of your colleagues know this too. Then one afternoon, in a meeting about the next round of promotions, you say it out loud.
You might expect relief, or at least a grudging nod. More often the room goes cold, and over the following months you find yourself left off emails. You told the truth, everyone half-knew it, and you were punished anyway. Why?
Because some lies are load-bearing. They hold up the ceiling of social reality, the shared narratives about fairness, competence, progress and identity, and removing them does not reveal truth underneath. It collapses the structure on everyone inside. Truth must be attended to by a bodyguard of lies in order to survive the gauntlet of acidic illusion.
What the fiction holds up
Picture a building held up by columns. Some are solid stone. Others are hollow plaster, fake but bearing real weight, because everything around them leans on them. If you smash a hollow column to prove it is fake, the ceiling does not thank you for your honesty. It falls on your head.
The meritocracy story is that kind of column. Corporate morality runs on it: everyone knows decisions are made to please the boss, but the official narrative of merit has to be maintained because it is the only thing preventing open warfare. Once promotions are admitted to be political, every promotion becomes a grievance and every manager’s authority becomes a question of who backed whom. The fiction is false, and it is also what lets people work beside each other without fighting about it every day.
It holds up something more personal as well. Every person is the protagonist of their own story, and nobody thinks of themselves as an opportunistic vulture. People prefer to believe in their wisdom and fairness rather than their incompetence and cruelty, so your promoted colleagues believe they earned it. When you say promotions are political, each of them hears that their own place was unearned, and that you saw through something they missed. The feeling that someone else is more intelligent than we are is almost intolerable. You were not correcting an error in the room. You were threatening the floor each person was standing on.
That is why Thiel’s question, “what important truth do very few people agree with you on?”, finds so few takers. Truth isn’t valuable to most companies and groups because it is corrosive to the stories that hold them together. It is valuable only to groups that can profitably mine it for new realization. Everyone else treats it as a solvent to be kept away from the structure.
Why argument doesn’t work
The natural next move is to make the case better: bring the data on who got promoted and why. It rarely helps, because beliefs like this are not held for their accuracy. They are held because they are load-bearing. Jed McKenna puts the mechanism plainly: “I don’t think it has to be true — it just has to stop the itch.” A colleague who needs to believe he earned his title is not weighing your evidence. He is scratching. So arguments that demolish a load-bearing illusion do not produce enlightenment. They produce hostility, because the person correctly senses that their structure is under attack.
What works is slower: instill willingness to change over change itself. You can provide an environment that catalyzes change, through nurture or challenge, but take no credit for the change, as it is they who changed themselves. In the meeting, that might have meant asking what the promotion criteria are meant to reward, rather than announcing that they reward nothing. A question leaves people room to notice the gap on their own, and someone who notices it on their own has nothing to defend against you.
When the wall should come down
None of this means every fiction deserves protection. Load-bearing illusions are neither good nor evil; they are structural. Some should be replaced with better structures. Some cannot be removed until alternative support has been built. And some, like the protagonist story each person tells about themselves, should simply be respected as the price of coexistence. A company that keeps promoting the wrong people will pay for it eventually, and someone has to say so.
The question is scope. Radical honesty is powerful because it is selective: Blanton does not say “destroy all fictions.” He says stop withholding from people you are in relationship with. The lightbringer fails exactly here. He sees that the wall is false and mistakes that perception for permission to tear it down. Light is necessary, but without replacement supports, timing, and responsibility, illumination becomes demolition.
So before saying it in the meeting, ask what the fiction is holding up, and whether you are ready to carry that weight instead. And when you feel the urge to prove someone wrong, remember that there is no more infuriating feeling than having your individuality ignored. The fiction they are living is not a problem to solve. It is a person to see.
References:
- Adapted from notes on Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power, reinterpreted through the lens of narrative and structural fiction