Fair point—that line was a bit tongue-in-cheek.

But I'm comfortable living with contradictions, so I do believe there is a meritocracy, but I don't believe it's total.

Only wading in the shallows because I actually have some work to get to today, but to clarify by example:

I'm sure most North Americans around this forum grew up hearing lines like "you don't want to end up a janitor". Personally, I've seen episodes like factory supervisors ignore physical health requests because their faithful hourly workers were "probably just trying to get off easy" (no, they ended up losing their job when their back gave out). Obviously they were only a line hand, so they're probably a dirtbag, as the line of reasoning followed in that situation.. and so on.

Definitely not touching the hot mess of "marrying upward" or other potential confidence games.