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Meritocracy Dupe

Rodney Clough
4 min readJan 28, 2025

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“General George Washington Resigning His Commission,” painting by John Trumbull. Image courtesy wikipedia.com

The term, ‘dupe,’ both verb and noun, demands a lean-in and listen-to.

“dupe,” verb, (to) deceive, trick

“dupe,” noun, a victim of deception

When former Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley was questioned in a Congressional hearing as to why he was reading Karl Marx, the father of communism, Milley replied to inform himself about communism and its thrall over people, further explaining to his questioner, that ‘just because I read Marx, doesn’t make (me) a communist.’

Reading Marx, Milley would have come across this proposition: “from each according to their ability to each according to their need.” (1) Consider the oft-misinterpreted reasoning behind this phrase: Marx’s dicta serve as a reminder of how coinage and repetition can dominate rational thought. Such served Milley’s study of communism — contextually, how did we get to Stalin from this?

In and of itself “meritocracy” — ‘according to their ability ‘— isn’t evil. Rather, consider ‘meritocracy’ as a sham used by those who would dominate through oppression (2).

And ‘meritocracy’ has been on full display since January 20.

‘SecDef’ appointee Pete Hegseth repeated the term ‘meritocracy’ multiple times during his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Senators who voted for Hegseth…

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Rodney Clough
Rodney Clough

Written by Rodney Clough

Refuses to nap. Septuagenarian. Cliche’ raker. Writes weekly.

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