"Inhumane thing, what they did," I finished the tirade on the Turkey-EU refugee deal in 2016, only now noticing the bewilderment in the eyes across the table. Perhaps the networking dinners among 19th-century pillars are not the place for a conversation like that, even with a child of Syrian refugees, so we awkwardly parted ways.
"I did my exchange at…" Someone gracefully took over. I could not make out the ending over the applause, but I am sure it was a great school. After all, the same dozen schools keep recurring in the conversations around, and they all blur into one. Shall we talk about our favorite travel places or go back to the recruitment tips?
The reign of meritocracy in the university circles masks the self-selecting and self-replicating process that the journey towards corporate elite status entails. The visiting associates lean towards those who resemble them, just as they were once cherished for mirroring those who selected them. In this, they grow to believe in the innate superiority of the type, a spirit of effort and intellect that cannot help but be noticed and rewarded.
How many dinners does it take to soak in the superior character and energy, while the rest of the population sluggishly leans into comfortable mediocrity? I am allowed to witness the process of transcendence, a journey of approximation toward the types of characters meritocracy implies will dominate under these ceilings. In due course, when a degree of power is extended, they will fully grow into believing that their privileges are natural consequences of their own elite selves. It is a process that makes one so polished, no rough edges are left, though it is on the edges that originality germinates. So this table does not allow for convictions, nor can it sustain a conversation that ventures beyond what contributes to the efficiency of corporate operations. The choice I am left with is to remain quiet or sand the edges to the point where there is nothing left to say.
If it happens that the strivers find themselves amongst the group whose misfortune is thrust upon them by an unlucky stroke of fate, their new identity as powerless victims will be enough to cast doubt on their eligibility to join the circles to which their nurturing had entitled them. Their newly acquired abrasions spoil the impeccability of the scene, and they themselves will be judged to simply be too different to mirror those above them. After all, it was a disservice to remind someone of their connection to the refugee undesirables at a dinner of mirrors.
And so the climbers learn not to tempt fate and not throw themselves into the storms that roughen both the palms and the minds. Through the feedback loop of endless social vetting, they outsource identity formation to corporations that so enticingly feed them with bits of power. Venturing off this path through independent knowledge and beliefs sabotages the climb. What can be compartmentalized will be; what is palatable will be packed into products for sale and badges of honor to wear. Beliefs less acceptable in their circles, they revisit covertly, like a criminal secretly holding on to a dear unsellable treasure. So they keep tailoring themselves into a frictionless figure until no convictions are left but those given to it, a figure unable to wield with courage the power finally entrusted to it.
If there is a reason to grieve the climbers, who, in their success and abundance, lack the awareness of the limitedness that success imposed on them, it is for the loss of freedom. For all their status, they still sell their labor, and, lacking an embodied sense of belonging to the working class, dissolve into the corporation's rationality. Trained by efficiency into the desert of critical thought, they no longer believe in independent reason beyond the system and learn to “love their own servitude,” as Huxley put it, along with the gleeful obliviousness that follows it. The tyranny of corporate rationalization and efficiency constructs structures of which they are subordinate parts, optimizing the means and not questioning the ends.
It is not that they passively accept their social position, as it is the position they strove for. Is it a position that validates the inner need for superiority, or simply does not burden one with the task of setting their own ends? The assurance of one’s elite self is an anesthetic that makes the loss of freedom and the acquisition of a prescribed identity bearable, having turned the ambitious mind into what Mills called a cheerful robot. A robot that excitedly shares its favorite travel cities among 19th-century pillars.