414. Places where everybody is a meritocrat.

It's taken me decades but now I know exactly where I want to stand with respect to social constructionists of knowledge — you know, people who believe that "there is no neutral or objective rationality but rather what is understood as knowledge is a socially contingent result of prevailing power dynamics" (Wikipedia, describing critical race theorist Gary Peller's beliefs).  This rules out any objectively determined meritocracy.  I want to stand with Gilbert and Sullivan's all-powerful Mikado as he chooses the eternal repetitions in hell that will exactly fit each crime. 

For social constructionists I will seek out the places where they will cry for someone who they're sure knows what he's doing, like from their backs on an operating table, or standing on the top of a fourteener not knowing how to get down, or on the bridge of a destroyer where if you read the flags wrong you get cut in half by an aircraft carrier.

  I will put them there and then laugh as the Mikado does, on and on, at people like the proud pool shark, who must play forever "on a cloth untrue/ With a twisted cue/And elliptical billiard balls."  Ah-ha-ha-Ah-ha-ha-Ah-ha-ha louder and louder until you can't help joining in seeing the poor bastard lining up a shot and then another and thinking of the poor constructionist bastard on the table yelling, "Prevailing power dynamics my ass, do you have an MD? a certification in residency? did you show superior merit with the scalpel?  Oh my poor rupturing appendix."

Like the Mikado I realize I am letting my sadism show so I pretend that each of these prisoners in hell is presented only as "A source of innocent merriment!/ Of innocent merriment!"   Ah-ha-ha-ah.

I'd feel sorrier if there weren't such a serious point to be made here: that life is full of real hazards, and we need each others' help, and some people know the hazards better than others.  People who dismiss that knowledge deserve the laughter they get.  They are a danger.  

Are there such people?  No, they've been pretty well laughed off the stage.  Only in academia, only up the Ivory Tower, will you find them.  That's the only place where people can still get so far from the real world that they can't hear its laughter.