Scientific culture created a framework within which individual mobility was possible without threatening hierarchical work-force allocation. On the contrary, meritocracy reinforced hierarchy. Finally, meritocracy as an operation and scientific culture as an ideology created veils that hindered perception of the underlying operations of historical capitalism.
Interpretation
This quote discusses how scientific culture and meritocracy influence social mobility and reinforce existing hierarchies.
Immanuel Wallerstein argues that scientific culture provides a framework that allows individuals to move within the workforce without challenging the existing hierarchical structures. He posits that rather than promoting true equality, meritocracy functions to reinforce these hierarchies by obscuring the realities of historical capitalism, which requires critical examination to unveil its underlying operations.
In practice
In a lecture about social structures, you might use this quote to explain the complexities of meritocracy.
If we return to the two faces of individualism - individualism as the spur of energy, initiative, and imagination; and individualism as the limitless struggle of all against all - it can be seen how the two practices emerge from and limit the extend of the disequilibrating impact of the contradiction involved in the geocultural agenda.
The break from the supposedly culturally-narrow religious bases of knowledge in favor of supposedly trans-cultural scientific bases of knowledge served as the self-justification of a particularly pernicious form of cultural imperialism.
This is a steady, ceaseless process, impossible to contain as long as the economy driven by the endless accumulation of capital. The system may prolong its life by slowing down some of the activities which are wearing it out, but death always looms somewhere on the horizon.
What is different in capitalist civilization has been two things. First, the process of meritocracy has been proclaimed as an official virtue instead of being merely a de facto reality. The culture has been different. And secondly, the percentage of the world's population for whom such ascent was possible has gone up. But even though it has grown up, meritocratic ascent remains very much the attribute of a minority.
Historical capitalism is a materialist civilization.
It is this third consequence that has been elaborated in greatest detail and has formed one of the most significant pillars of historical capitalism, institutional racism.
For the complete extinction of the state, complete Communism is necessary.
If the many and the One be indeed the same Reality, then it is not all modes of worship alone, but equally all modes of work, all modes of struggle, all modes of creation, which are paths of realization. No distinction, henceforth, between sacred and secular. To labour is to pray. To conquer is to renounce. Life is itself religion. To have and to hold is as stern a trust as to quit and to avoid.
Human relations are impossible. When they are real they are uncomfortable, and when they are comfortable they are unreal. It was for the journey into solitude that the human soul was created.
Instant Karma's gonna get you, gonna knock you right on the head
One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.
We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.
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