The Trauma-ocracy

The meritocracy has evolved into the trauma-ocracy.

For a long time, “merit” was how the rulers of neoliberal society justified their power—that they had more merit, meaning intelligence and competence, so they deserved their power. This phenomenon—rule by those with merit—came to be known as the meritocracy.

By now, the meritocracy has fallen out of favor. Even Harvard and Princeton, two of the main institutions that peddled it over the last few decades, have disavowed it. It has been linked to privilege and just plain luck—and the more privilege you have, the luckier you get. Meritocracy was always a lie—it was just what elites told themselves so that they felt like they deserved to rule. That they were somehow smarter and just plain better than others.

So they don’t believe in meritocracy anymore, what happens now? They aren’t going to simply get rid of their privileged position and give up power—they’re going to remain in power, but come up with a different way of justifying it.

It seems obvious by now that the new tactic involves trauma—writing about how much trauma they have experienced, as a way of making themselves seem like victims, and so they deserve all the power and privilege they can get. If the elites convince themselves that they are the biggest victims, then there’s no limit to how much privilege they will be able to justify. The meritocracy has been replaced by this new system—the trauma-ocracy.

If you suffer more, then you deserve your status, and can’t be seen as privileged. Trauma is the anti-privilege, which is precisely why the elites have placed so much value on trauma. It’s the magic potion that allows them to rule everything with a clean conscience.

Trauma has become competitive—instead of grades, test scores, and competence, intelligence, and anything else related to merit, the real competition is about trauma now. If you want a coveted spot in a top college, you need to learn how to defeat the competition in trauma performance.

Another benefit of the transition from meritocracy to trauma-ocracy is that trauma is shaped into a kind of suffering acceptable to the ruling class. They like stories about struggle based on being a refugee or immigrant, dealing with sexual identity, gender, maybe some kind of medical issue that needed to be overcome, etc. etc. The elites can work with all that. What they don’t like are stories about economic poverty, at least not on a large scale, because that would be too much like addressing actual socioeconomic injustice, and they don’t want to do that.

The trauma has to make you unique—and just being poor isn’t unique, especially not in America in 2023. Most people are poor now. 64% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck now. Just talking about that doesn’t make you stand out—it has to be the kind of trauma that elites can find fascinating. They don’t find the grinding poverty of most Americans’ lives to be fascinating. They find it to be something that should be ignored mostly.

So you have to know which kind of trauma to use, and also how to use it. You have to write about it in a way that shows you have enough distance from the trauma so that it won’t detract from your ability to function seamlessly as a student and later employee. It has to be something you learned from, that shaped you, and that drives you, but that doesn’t fester in you. It’s neatly in your rearview mirror, and it’s something you have managed to find the positive side of to use as fuel for your success. Maybe you will devote some time, after you are granted entrance into the ranks of the successful, to helping those who had traumatic experiences similar to yours. Your story of triumph can be used to inspire them, and so on. Elites love that shit.

Your trauma—your pain and suffering—must be transformed into something that can in fact validates the system that produces it. Instead of your trauma being an argument against the system that caused it—as it should be!—it becomes a justification for it, because it produced your trauma, and your trauma is so valuable that it got you a golden ticket into the elites. This is the magic act that you need to perform to make it in the trauma-ocracy.