Right; our society (especially at the top) infers merit from wealth and status instead of distributing wealth and status according to any meaningful measure of merit.
Mythical, even.
But in any case, if your goal is to create a society where wealth and power are distributed based on any reasonable definition of “merit” then the first step is to recognize our current system has almost no correlation between the two.
Many of the richest, most powerful people on the planet got that way by either fucking over society or inheriting their money from someone who did.
