My work is founded on the premise that the current system doesn’t reward merit; it rewards capital. And the two are not the same thing.
A person with inherited wealth accumulates more. A person with the right connections gets the contract. A person with leisure time and stability has more opportunity to thrive.
The system isn’t blind to effort; it’s blind to everything except money.
What I propose is a genuinely multi-dimensional contribution model. Social capital, relational investment, skill-sharing, showing up. These aren’t soft alternatives to real value. They are the real value. I’m simply trying to make them legible and reciprocal.
And I’m not talking about meritocracy stripped of capitalism. I’m talking about meritocracy restored. Real meritocracy. As it always has been. Freed from the single-axis reduction that money imposes.
In a relationship-based economy, worth isn’t assigned by a market. It’s earned in community, over time, through demonstrated presence and contribution.
Those who give more, receive more. Not as a way of punishing laziness; but because trust compounds. Participation builds relational equity. And absence… doesn’t.
The mechanism isn’t moral judgment. It’s social memory.
I understand the frustration of carrying those who aren’t showing up when you need them to, but this line of thought seems to me to be rooted in the trappings of the current carrot and stick competitive culture. If people aren’t showing up, there’s something else wrong. Meritocracy just leads to people striving to get more and more out of the community instead of striving always for a better, happier community for all.
Not saying you’re wrong. You have more experience in this area than I, but that’s how it strikes me.
I agree that the system I’m describing must not formally track participation; and thus merit. If it becomes a formal tracking system, then it is just a carrot and stick environment.
What I’m describing is what happens naturally in a community when people notice who helps and who doesn’t…
and then it’s simply human instinct to want to reciprocate appropriately.
And you are absolutely right that there is something else wrong in the system. You cannot demand that people do what you want them to do. You have to inspire them to want to do what you want them to do.
And people must be inspired to participate rather than coerced.
https://substack.com/@kommunitykoin/note/c-255744830
Cheers, friends