I remember once during college, chatting with a classmate about a mutual friend who didn’t get into graduate school. One classmate said, quite naturally, “He just didn’t work hard enough.”
At the time, that sentence sounded entirely reasonable. Because we ourselves had gotten in, we figured: we got in because we worked hard enough. He didn’t get in because he didn’t work hard enough. What a clear causal relationship.
Twenty years later, I know how arrogant that sentence was.
Not because that friend turned out fine—in fact, I don’t know how things went for him. But because I finally realized: my getting in was due, beyond hard work, to a hundred factors I couldn’t see at the time. I was born into a family that valued education, I had books to read from childhood, my health never interrupted my studies with any illness, and my financial situation allowed me to prepare for exams full-time without having to work part-time.
None of these did I “earn.” They were luck.
The Illusion of the Winner
In The Tyranny of Merit, Sandel calls this phenomenon “the illusion of the winner.”
The meritocratic narrative goes like this: society is fair, opportunity is open. As long as you’re smart enough and work hard enough, you can succeed. So the successful succeed because they deserve it. The failures fail because they aren’t good enough.
This narrative has two fatal problems.
First, it severely underestimates the role of luck and structure. Which country and family you were born into, whether you had access to good education, your gender, race, and health—these factors influence the course of your life far more than your personal “effort.” But meritocracy encourages you to ignore these factors and believe that everything was earned by yourself.
Second, and this is the more poisonous part: it makes winners arrogant and losers self-blaming.
Winners feel: “My success is what I deserve.” So they lack empathy for losers—you failed? That’s your problem, not my responsibility. Losers feel: “My failure is what I deserve.” So they don’t question the system; they only question themselves—it’s that I’m not good enough, not hardworking enough, not smart enough.
This dual effect is the root of social fracture.
The Taiwanese Version of Meritocracy
Taiwan is a region of heavy devotion to meritocracy.
We have an entire social ladder built around “academic advancement”: elementary school competing for middle school, middle school for high school, high school for university, university for graduate school. Each stage has an exam, exam scores determine which school you enter, the school’s reputation determines what job you can find, and the job’s salary determines your place in society.
This path looks fair—everyone takes the same questions, and those with higher scores advance. But “the same questions” obscures one fact: the people sitting in the exam hall came in with completely different starting lines.
Children in Taipei can attend cram schools, hire tutors, and buy study guides. Children in remote rural areas might have to help with farm work when they get home. Wealthy families can let their children focus solely on studying, while children from struggling families might start working part-time in high school.
Then we look at the exam results and say: “See, fair competition, the best people rose to the top.”
This isn’t fairness. This is dressing up inequality in the clothing of fairness.
The Meritocratic Myth in Startup Circles
I see the same logic in startup circles, just with a different packaging.
“Hard work guarantees success” becomes “As long as you have enough execution, enough vision, enough willingness to sacrifice, you can build your company up.”
I myself once believed in this. In the early days of my startup, I did work extremely hard—working over ten hours a day, thinking about the company on weekends too, putting health and family behind. The company survived, and I thought: it was my hard work that kept it alive.
But honestly, among the reasons the company survived, “the timing was right” and “good luck” probably accounted for a larger share than I’d care to admit. I entered a growing market at the right moment, I encountered a few clients willing to give me a chance, and my team had a few people much stronger than me who held the line at critical moments.
Crediting all this to “my hard work” is like standing on the crest of a wave and saying, “I made the sea rise.”
And what about the entrepreneurs who failed? They might have worked just as hard as me, or even harder. But their timing was a little off, their luck a little worse, or at some critical moment they lacked a benefactor. The meritocratic narrative would say: “They failed, so something must not have been good enough.” But the fact might simply be: the dice didn’t land on the right side.
The Unfair Pressure on the Younger Generation
Let me turn the focus to the younger generation.
In Taiwan, the pressure young people bear is structural, not personal.
Housing prices have risen to a level that wages can’t keep up with. Good job opportunities are increasingly concentrated in a few fields and a few hands. The return on investment in education is declining—you spend four or even six years earning a degree, and the salary you come out with might be about the same as the starting wage of your parents’ generation who didn’t go to university.
But the meritocratic narrative tells them: “As long as you work hard enough, you can succeed.” So when they struggle within this structure, they don’t question the structure—they question themselves.
“I didn’t work hard enough.” “I chose the wrong major.” “I’m not capable enough.”
This is the cruelest part of meritocracy. It turns a problem of structure into a personal sin. In “The Immoral Society, the Moral Individual”, I discussed Niebuhr’s view: an individual can be moral, but social structures can be immoral. To blame the individual for consequences produced by an immoral structure is a systematic injustice.
A Faith Perspective: Grace vs. Merit
As someone with a background in theological training, I see in Sandel’s argument a very familiar theme.
Christian theology has a core concept called “grace”—your existence, your abilities, your opportunities are not “earned” by you, but “given” to you. You are a recipient, not a self-made achiever.
This concept directly conflicts with meritocracy. Meritocracy says: you are the architect of your own destiny. Grace says: the ground you stand on is not of your making.
I’m not saying everyone must be a Christian to understand this. But I believe the concept of “grace”—acknowledging that much in our lives was not earned by ourselves—is an important antidote to elite arrogance.
When you acknowledge that a large part of your success was luck and given opportunity, it becomes hard to tell a failure “it’s your own problem.” You begin to feel: since I have received so much, what responsibility do I have toward this society?
Redefining Contribution
Sandel’s solution isn’t to overthrow meritocracy, but to redefine “contribution.”
A nurse caring for the elderly, a worker repairing roads, a clerk working the night shift at a convenience store, a farmer growing crops—their contribution to society is no less than a Wall Street analyst’s. But meritocracy’s wage structure tells you: the analyst earns tens of millions a year, the nurse earns forty thousand a month. This wage gap implies a message: your work isn’t important enough.
The real way forward isn’t to have everyone compete for National Taiwan University, start companies, or chase that position at the top of the pyramid. It’s to build a society where every job is respected—not just in words, but in real respect in terms of wages, institutions, and culture.
This goal sounds far off. But its starting point is very near: every person who recognizes that their success wasn’t entirely earned by themselves is the beginning of change.
Elite arrogance isn’t a personal problem; it’s an institutional problem. But institutional change requires individuals to first set aside their arrogance. It starts with acknowledging the role of luck, with respecting different forms of contribution. And one more thing: stop telling young people “you just didn’t work hard enough.”
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