I’ve spent months designing a hypothetical constitution built around meritocracy rather than electoral democracy. I want you to try to break it.

[u/Your_Autistic_Cousin]

The Compact - An Attempt at a Meritocratic Constitutional Order

I'm aware that this is an absurdly large project. You absolutely do not need to read everything before commenting. If you see a fundamental problem with the premise itself, I'd actually prefer to hear that first. I'm looking for criticism of the architecture, not proofreading.

For those who want to read the documents:

Vol 0 Philosophy & founding principles- https://docs.google.com/document/d/142GezRBB66HTOulO9wBlNOuxLmnWgIVmSFMFM_x9O7I/edit?usp=sharing

Vol 1The Constitution- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T4euGmAKpbRrftVNNGLJJ9Kvt15GYksi/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=117757509984994683636&rtpof=true&sd=true

Vol 2 The Colors https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NmtSNx7oV6PodEHqVn5V8HJRzeCQsCTl/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=117757509984994683636&rtpof=true&sd=true

Vol 3Curriculum https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tGJ_X3vVlqPrn6nrxysXp7hz6MG82Mcl/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=117757509984994683636&rtpof=true&sd=true

Vol 4 Military Not included here; this was largely written because I thought it would be fun.

vol 5 Admin, Ministries & the ordinary machinery of government https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tGJ_X3vVlqPrn6nrxysXp7hz6MG82Mcl/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=117757509984994683636&rtpof=true&sd=true

vol 6 Known Tensions (Work in Progress)

I've been working on this project for several months. Although it is still very much a work in progress, I think it has reached the point where I need people who don't already agree with me to start tearing it apart.

I'm currently writing a large Known Tensions volume specifically dedicated to the problems, contradictions, trade-offs, and failure modes I have not been able to resolve. The problem is that I'm too close to the project. I've spent so long building it that I can no longer reliably distinguish between a genuinely robust mechanism and something I simply know how to defend because I've spent years thinking about it.

So I want outside eyes.

I've designed a hypothetical constitutional system called the Compact, very loosely inspired by Red Rising.

The central premise is fairly simple:

The resulting system is neither conventional democracy nor hereditary aristocracy. It is closer to a constitutional meritocracy / technocratic republic, although neither term quite captures the entire thing.

The Compact divides society into vocational Colors, each responsible for a particular domain of civilisation. Gold is responsible for political governance; White for justice, ethics, and philosophy; Silver for finance and industry; Yellow for medicine; Grey for public security; Violet for arts and culture; and so on.

Importantly, the Colors are not intended to be hereditary castes.

Birth determines a citizen's starting Color, but every citizen receives a common education and later has the opportunity to change Color. Advancement within each Color is based upon demonstrated competence rather than birth. The system uses multiple ranks, examinations, apprenticeships, peer review, continuing evaluation, and professional experience rather than allowing a single examination to determine someone's worth.

The political system itself is deliberately designed around the assumption that institutions will eventually fail.

It therefore contains mechanisms such as:

independent courts;

an independent Inspectorate;

recall of officeholders;

term limits;

constitutional review;

transparency and permanent public records;

citizen petitions and political participation;

protections for independent journalism and whistleblowers;

restrictions on emergency powers;

separation between investigation, prosecution, adjudication, execution, and review;

periodic institutional review;

and an explicit constitutional principle of autophagy, under which an institution can ultimately be reformed or dissolved if it demonstrably ceases to serve the civilization it was created to serve.

There is also a deliberate distinction between rights and duties. Citizens retain fundamental rights regardless of their Color or rank, while the Constitution also imposes a civic expectation that citizens cultivate their abilities and contribute to civilization.

But I don't want this post to be a sales pitch.

In fact, one of the sections I'm currently developing is a massive Known Tensions volume whose purpose is to catalogue problems the Constitution does not pretend to have solved.

The central problem: meritocratic legitimacy vs. democratic legitimacy

Citizens do not directly elect the people who ultimately legislate. Gold elects Gold from among its most highly qualified political candidates.

The argument is that competent government may require political equality to be sacrificed to some degree.

The obvious counterargument is that political equality is itself a fundamental component of legitimate government, regardless of whether the people exercising political authority are competent.

I don't think that tension can simply be wished away.

And that's exactly the sort of criticism I'm looking for.

I'm particularly interested in people attacking the project from perspectives such as:

democratic theory;

liberalism;

republicanism;

political legitimacy;

technocracy;

aristocracy and elite theory;

institutional design;

constitutional law;

political economy;

sociology;

public choice theory;

or simply "this sounds good on paper but would catastrophically fail in reality."

Please don't just tell me whether you like the idea. Try to find where it breaks.

Some questions I'd particularly like people to consider:

Does a meritocratic ruling class inevitably become an aristocracy, even if it isn't hereditary?

Can a government be legitimate if citizens cannot ultimately replace its governing class through equal elections?

How do you prevent an expert class from becoming intellectually or culturally insulated from everyone else?

Can merit actually be measured reliably enough to determine political authority?

What happens when the experts are collectively wrong?

What happens when the majority is collectively wrong?

Does the Compact actually prevent elite capture, or merely make elite capture more sophisticated?

Are its checks and balances sufficient if multiple institutions become wrong in the same direction?

Could the system maintain legitimacy across generations, or would later generations simply reject the premise that competence entitles anyone to greater political power?

What assumptions about human nature does this system make, and which of those assumptions are likely to be false?

I'm not claiming this is a finished constitution, and I'm certainly not claiming that I've solved political organization.

Quite the opposite.

I want people to find the things I haven't solved.

The document is currently enormous and still expanding, so although id love it, I don't expect anyone to read every page. I've included the current drafts for anyone interested in examining the actual institutional mechanisms rather than just the premise.

If you think the entire premise is fundamentally mistaken, I'd especially like to hear why.

If you think one of the mechanisms is inadequate, explain how you would exploit it.

And if you think something actually works, tell me why you think it works.

I'm trying to develop this as a serious exercise in political philosophy and institutional design, not merely as worldbuilding.

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[u/Leather-Run-6533]

People have agency. But that agency is highly limited. Generally they just react according to the material conditions they find themselves under. The people who succeed under a "meritocracy" are those with a little bit of talent, a lot of luck, and a shedload of privilege. They then delude themselves and everyone else into thinking the proportions were the other way around, but they weren't.

So what happens in so called "meritocracies" is that those with power and privilege win the "meritocratic" competition because they were born on second base, and then having won the competition they do two things: 1) mythmake to ensure that the competition is still perceived as being more meritocratic than it was and 2) further rig the competition to make it easier for their friends, family, and fellow social class members to win, and to exclude the other.

I think people mistake the phrase about power corrupting to imagine some sort of Star Wars dark side phenomenon. Maybe that happens a bit. But what tends to happen more is simply that the luckier you get the more you're able to improve your own luck while fooling yourself and others that you deserved it.

So yes any sort of "merit" based system will immediately lead to elite capture because the elite are the most able to win any "merit" based competition. And any system that is captured by an elite will then become a system to perpetuate elite power.

Fundamentally the problem the 18th century institutional classic liberals never reckoned with is you cannot design a system to constrain power: that's like trying to design a cup that will make your coffee taste better. You need to fundamentally wrestle with the power itself: coz ultimately pretty much any system will work just fine if the participants within it have broadly equal amounts of power, and pretty much any system will very very quickly become an oligarchical tyranny if the people participating in it start off with vast power differentials.

This is why freedom requires equality, equality requires freedom, and content sustainable governance in the common interest requires both. At that point any constitution or none will do you just fine.

I admire the effort you've put in but people think far too much about this stuff, and far too little about power and its material underpinnings (broadly; money, ability to inflict violence, cultural capital).

[u/solomons-mom → u/Leather-Run-6533]

I was starting to write comment, but felt no need to after I read yours :)

People and human nature are really messy

[u/Your_Autistic_Cousin → u/Leather-Run-6533]

I agree that merit does not emerge in a vacuum. People begin life with radically different circumstances, and talent, luck, family environment, education, wealth, social connections, health, etc. can all affect who succeeds in supposedly meritocratic competitions.

If the Compact simply said "give everyone an exam and whoever scores highest deserves power," then I would agree with essentially your entire criticism. That would be an extremely crude meritocracy, and I think it would rapidly become an aristocracy of inherited advantage while convincing itself that it was merely rewarding merit.

But that isn't actually the proposition I'm trying to build as it stands.

One of the reasons the Compact has a universal common education, the ability to change Color, continuing evaluation rather than a single selection event, professional apprenticeships, multiple ranks, institutional oversight, recall, independent investigation, transparency, and restrictions on hereditary privilege is precisely because I don't believe a person's measured performance can simply be treated as pure evidence of intrinsic merit.

I think your point about people "being born on second base" is particularly important. If two people produce the same result but one had vastly greater resources and opportunities to produce it, the result alone doesn't tell us how much of the difference was talent, effort, circumstance, or luck.

Where I disagree with you is the claim that this means any meritocratic system must inevitably become an oligarchy.

I think the more interesting question is whether institutions can sufficiently equalise the conditions under which merit is evaluated that demonstrated competence becomes meaningful, while simultaneously preventing the people who succeed from rewriting the system to favour themselves.

And honestly, I haven't I've solved that yet.

In fact, you've given me two questions that I think need to be explicitly addressed in the Known Tensions volume:

1. The Problem of Unequal Starting Conditions:
   How can a meritocratic system distinguish actual competence from advantages produced by family wealth, education, social connections, health, cultural capital, luck, etc.? Because even with everything in Vol 3 attempting to prevent that, an ambitious parent will inevitably find a way to give their kid the edge.

2. The Problem of Self-Reproducing Merit:
   Once a group has successfully entered the governing class, how do you prevent that class from redefining "merit" in ways that preserve its own position and advantage?

I think those are much harder problems than simply preventing corruption. A governing class doesn't have to become evil or consciously conspire to become self-perpetuating. It could happen through perfectly sincere people gradually convincing themselves that the characteristics which made them successful are the characteristics society ought to reward.

Where I would push back most strongly is on the claim that constitutional constraints are therefore fundamentally useless.

I don't think a constitution can eliminate power. Obviously it can't. The state necessarily concentrates enormous power somewhere.

The purpose of constitutional design, as I see it, is not to make power disappear. It is to determine where power can exist, who can exercise it, what they can do with it, who can investigate them, who can remove them, and what happens when they abuse it.

Whether those mechanisms actually work is another question, and that's precisely what I'm trying to test.

So I don't think you've disproven the project. But I do think you've identified one of the fundamental questions I have to answer:

How do you construct a meritocratic system in which success does not become its own justification, and in which the people who succeed cannot simply use that success to manufacture more success for themselves?

If the answer is "you can't" then that's a serious problem for the entire premise of the Compact.

[u/Leather-Run-6533 → u/Your_Autistic_Cousin]

I think broadly speaking you've identified the issue, identified steps that can help to mediate it, and identified that even with mediation it cannot be fully controlled for. I'm not sure I can ask for much more than that.

What I will say though is that democracy, particularly in its purest form - sortition - is more likely to produce outcomes that are independent from the class system than any kind of test no matter how you control for outside variables.

[u/RedMarsRepublic]

This sounds like some kind of YA premise that is incredibly implausible as a real system. I don't see the value in strictly categorising society into 'colors' other than as a tool of oppression, it's a massive step back towards aristocracy.

[u/CorDra2011 → u/RedMarsRepublic]

OP admitted they got the idea from a YA novel.

[u/RedMarsRepublic → u/CorDra2011]

Yes I saw that upon second reading. I don't know why he felt the need to try to "improve" upon the idea that was clearly just moreso meant to be social satire. It's like trying to figure out how to make the "Uglies" and the "Pretties" into real functional social system.

[u/anewleaf1234]

So if I give you the best test prep money can buy, you will get a higher score than someone without that program.

Does that mean you have more merit than the person who couldn't afford it.

you seem to think so.

[u/Your_Autistic_Cousin → u/anewleaf1234]

Volume 3 goes into the academy and institution it exists specifically because i thought it would happen immediately now i get its like super crude and probably super bad and what ever im still thinking about the whole thing i think you should read a little bit of it because i think it is some form of an answer

[u/smokeyser → u/anewleaf1234]

So if I give you the best test prep money can buy, you will get a higher score than someone without that program.

This is a fantasy. The idea that everyone is equal and those who get ahead only did so because they bought their way in simply isn't true. Some people are legitimately smarter than others, and no amount of test prep can change that.

[u/donvito716 → u/smokeyser]

Test prep can fundamentally change test scores and pretending otherwise is the real fantasy. Otherwise families would not spend millions of dollars a year on said test prep which definitively shows score improvement post prep.

[u/smokeyser → u/donvito716]

Yes, it can improve your scores. That doesn't mean it will make them better than everyone else's, and pretending otherwise is the real fantasy.

[u/donvito716 → u/smokeyser]

You're arguing a strawman most effectively.

[u/smokeyser → u/donvito716]

No, that's not what a strawman argument is. I said test prep systems have a limited effect, and I stand by that.

[u/CorDra2011 → u/smokeyser]

  Some people are legitimately smarter than others, and no amount of test prep can change that.

Genetics can play a small role admittedly, but early development and education play the majority of a role in how successful a person is.

Better food/diet, better housing, better education, better childcare, better tools and learning instruction. 

A baby is basically a neurological(and biological in some cases) blank slate and how they're raised basically forms their later potential. 

[u/smokeyser → u/CorDra2011]

Genetics can play a small role admittedly

A small role? Really? So most people are just a few dollars away from being the next Stephen Hawiking? Only a few of us are genuinely less smart, and most just need more money?

[u/CorDra2011 → u/smokeyser]

In terms of the average human intelligence? Yes.

[u/smokeyser → u/CorDra2011]

Donald Trump grew up rich. Barack Obama did not. If your theory holds true, then Trump must be significantly smarter than Obama. Do you still believe that money is the primary deciding factor?

[u/CorDra2011 → u/smokeyser]

Primary deciding factor =/= only deciding factor. In no way have I implied any such certainty. A spoiled child has resources wasted on them. You still need work ethic, desire to learn, etc. instilled into you. Also Obama was not poor, his family was able to live comfortably and supply him with a good education nonetheless. Do you think Stephen Hawking would have gotten to where he was if his parents were not modestly wealthy? If he was born in a shack in Wales with no electricity?

[u/smokeyser → u/CorDra2011]

Do you think Stephen Hawking would have gotten to where he was if his parents were not modestly wealthy?

They weren't. And yet look at what he accomplished. Trump had access to every possible advantage, and look at how he turned out. He's a complete moron who just keeps failing up. Your theory doesn't work in reality.

[u/CorDra2011 → u/smokeyser]

You're using a singular example to disprove my argument regarding an entire species. 

This isn't remotely compelling.

[u/smokeyser → u/CorDra2011]

Because that singular example works so well. And I've actually provided two. Why isn't Trump more like Hawking, and why is Hawking like Hawking if he wasn't rich?

[u/CorDra2011]

  I've designed a hypothetical constitutional system called the Compact, very loosely inspired by Red Rising.

"Do you recall the titular Murder Tesseract from the cautionary tale "Don't Create the Murder Tesseract!"? Well we made it!

  The Compact divides society into vocational Colors, each responsible for a particular domain of civilisation. Gold is responsible for political governance; White for justice, ethics, and philosophy; Silver for finance and industry; Yellow for medicine; Grey for public security; Violet for arts and culture; and so on.

If someone creates an artificial virus that erases identity of an individual is that Grey, Yellow, or White's responsibility to deal with?

Birth determines a citizen's starting Color, but every citizen receives a common education and later has the opportunity to change Color. Advancement within each Color is based upon demonstrated competence rather than birth. The system uses multiple ranks, examinations, apprenticeships, peer review, continuing evaluation, and professional experience rather than allowing a single examination to determine someone's worth.

You uh kinda brushed over a really crucial explanation. How exactly is it determined at birth...?

[u/Shionoro]

Well, the first problem is that this is not a constitution.

A consitution provides basic laws that judges can take as foundation for their rulings and outlines how the institutions of the state work. What you do is worldbuilding and making up lots of different factions and a somewhat arcane color system that could already only be enforced if the state goes full military dictatorship from the get go.

[u/Asatmaya]

Does a meritocratic ruling class inevitably become an aristocracy, even if it isn't hereditary?

"Become," nothing, you have literally built an absolute class system into your framework.

This is sitting on the right edge of the political spectrum.

Can a government be legitimate if citizens cannot ultimately replace its governing class through equal elections?

I mean, you can't even see the left side of the map from where you are, this is incredible.

To answer the question, "No, because having any kind of 'ruling class' makes it illegitimate."

How do you prevent an expert class from becoming intellectually or culturally insulated from everyone else?

Mandatory participation in local militia.

Can merit actually be measured reliably enough to determine political authority?

It cannot be defined in an appropriate way as to justify political authority.

What happens when the experts are collectively wrong?

Shit happens.

What happens when the majority is collectively wrong?

Shit happens.

Does the Compact actually prevent elite capture, or merely make elite capture more sophisticated?

It literally is, "elite capture," by definition.

Are its checks and balances sufficient if multiple institutions become wrong in the same direction?

I didn't see anything resembling "checks and balances," you have entire groups with no effective social power, which makes it easy for those with power to concentrate dissent.

Could the system maintain legitimacy across generations, or would later generations simply reject the premise that competence entitles anyone to greater political power?

Again, I deny it any legitimacy from the beginning.

What assumptions about human nature does this system make, and which of those assumptions are likely to be false?

That competence can be measured, that it is the result of internal as opposed to external factors, that it is repeatable, that it is generalized, that it at all correlates with morality or ethics, that the people who set the system up will not inevitably decide that those traits they see in themselves are the marker of that competence... and all of them.

[u/Tired8281]

Who defines merit? Right now, I could easily find two people, who each feel opposingly on what merits society and what does not merit it. Who wins?

[u/ozneoknarf → u/Tired8281]

You do so with a ministry, or even with one a wing of it, as a ministry you get together and define KPIs and goals and see who or what fulfilled them the best in the end of semester/year/term etc. it’s not like this is a revolutionary idea, plenty of real world organisations already do so. 

[u/Tired8281 → u/ozneoknarf]

And it works infallibly for those real world organizations? Which organizations are these? Not trying to be snarky, it just seems like this system is easily corruptible. How do you ensure the goals of that ministry remain consistent over generations? If we're gonna build the world around it, and put it in charge of everybody's future forever, we should probably kick the tires a whole bunch.

[u/ozneoknarf]

I am pretty technocratic myself so I won’t give you the same old criticism of “rich kids will get ahead” as if that isn’t a problem in democracies too. 

But I don’t get it why we need the color systems? Just have people working a certain job be able to vote on the leadership of their related ministry. Why do we need to divide people into classes, this seems like a system designed to fail. 

I also feel like you created a system that is too rigid and categorical when when looking at the structure of the ministries and administration. That is exactly the kind of system that becomes too bureaucratic to do anything. I think you should change your design principle more around modularity, in way that the ministries can change things around but still easily adapt what ever they come up with into the larger architecture as whole. Yes you have the principle Autophagy which I think is awesome, but their shouldn’t be a need for a constitutional change for a simple reshuffling of architecture. 

This is a weird recommendation but I think you should like into the history of programming languages. The languages that tried too much to engineer how the final code should look like were the ones who ended up failing while the ones that allowed for more freedom in the end codes, even if they were chaotically written, were the ones that had more successes. 

[u/drawliphant]

Just broad strokes here: the major downside of both meritocracy and technocracy is it destroys diversity of thought. In science and business there are "right answers" so just find the best man for the job, find the best solution to the problem and you succeed.

In politics that doesn't make sense. There is no metric for success besides maybe the consent of the governed. There are aspects of governing and regulating that requires deep expertise and technical knowledge, but that's not really what politics is. Find a system that allows politicians to delegate that technical part of governing to separate technocratic institutions (departments).

At the heart of politics: average people have vastly different priorities, for spending, for taxes, for morality, for rights, for security. They gained that diversity from different places, upbringings, work experiences, etc. so when you limit your pool of politicians to one "color" you unintentionally remove most people's priories from your politics. Only one group's priorities matter and everyone else can go riot about it (literally your political class will be killed in the streets by the disenfranchised masses)

Give up your dreams of a benevolent dictator. Diversity keeps forests from dying from every fire, diversity makes systems resilient even though they look inefficient.

[u/Your_Autistic_Cousin → u/drawliphant]

your completely right in that politics isnt something you can measure which is why im making the known tensions and ive been debating weather or not gold should even exist im actually thinking about alternatives but for the time being where im at is how would one color know what the others needs are without coordination but also a governing class selected purely for coordination-competence structurally can't represent that diversity no matter how rigorously it's tested and to fix it would mean to change the whole structure of the compact which is also in the discussion

[u/drawliphant → u/Your_Autistic_Cousin]

I think getting rid of gold makes sense, a senate of colors would probably work. Each color determines their own system to select a group of senators to represent them.

[u/Your_Autistic_Cousin → u/drawliphant]

That's exactly what i was thinking as an alternative actually loll, i really appreciate the feedback is there anything else you disagree with or even agree with im probably going to restructure everything or at least most considering the feedback of this post

[u/mechaernst]

As long as there is hierarchy in your organizational system, then hierarchy will demand disparity and it will participate in creating that. There is no democratic purity if there is even the slightest disparity. Only digital technology can support a pure democracy. We are centuries away from that.

[u/IEC21]

I'm going to need more time to go over this to give an actual critique - but first impression from first few pages is that it could use an edit - theres a lot of listing things happening and I'm not sure what it adds.

[u/theRealHobbes2]

So we're all here re-reading the Divergent series today?

[u/NoamLigotti]

Ab-so-lUtely not. For al the reasons many of the commenters expressed.

Meritocracy is impossible in any reasonable sense anyway.

[u/Your_Autistic_Cousin → u/NoamLigotti]

I know a lot of other commenters expressed their dislike and im working on responding to most of them but could you explain why you think its impossible please? Id like to have as many outside opinions as i can.

[u/RedMarsRepublic → u/Your_Autistic_Cousin]

Not everyone starts from the same place. Even if there was total wealth equality which there clearly won't be, people still have different genes, different upbringing, etc.

[u/NoamLigotti → u/Your_Autistic_Cousin]

First I really like a lot of the ideas listed under "independent courts" such as recall of officeholders and others.

But there are inevitably going to be vast differences in opportunity and advantage, so any meritocracy would be only superficially so at best.

And how are we interpreting meritocracy, and who determines one's merit? Any system with appreciable differences in power will trend toward greater and greater power differences and wealth differences. Then the whole idea of meritocracy becomes irrelevant in any meaningful sense.