By Predictive History in Secret History — 13 Sep 2025

Secret History #7: Death by Meritocracy

The concept of meritocracy means that people should succeed based on their talent, ability, and hard work. In theory, this sounds like a good idea. In fact, the school system is built around the idea of a meritocracy: the good students go to the best universities, and after they graduate, they will get the very best jobs. That's the idea. But I will show you that there are actually lots of problems with the meritocracy. In fact, this idea is actually destroying American society.

The World's Most Complicated Admissions System

The first thing I'm going to do is explain why America has the world's most complicated admissions system. In China, when you apply to university, you take the Gaokao—you take an examination—and based on your test score, you get into university. This is a system that most countries use. Only in America is the system this complicated. Your transcript matters, but so do your standardized test scores like the SAT and the TOEFL. So do your extracurriculars, teacher recommendation letters, and essays in which you have to say, "I'm a really good person." Why does it matter if you're a good person? It's the world's most complicated admissions system, and I will explain why we have it.

Our story starts in England in the 1600s. At this time in history, there was a major conflict between religious belief and the king. The king is head of the Anglican Church, the official church of England. There's almost no difference between the Anglican Church and the Catholic Church; the only difference is that in the Catholic Church, the head is the Pope, while in the Anglican Church, the head is the King of England. In terms of rituals and belief, it's the same.

Now, there were people called Protestants who believed there should be no pope and no king. You, as an individual, should be able to access God directly, and you do that by reading the Bible. At this time, there was a major conflict between the Protestants—the Puritans or the Dissenters—and the king, and it led to wars. The solution was the king saying to the Dissenters, "Hey, there's this new place called America. It's far away. Go there and leave me alone."

So the Dissenters went as pilgrims to America to build their own theocracy, what they believed to be the new Jerusalem or heaven on earth. One core belief of the Protestants is that you must read the Bible to understand the mind of God. Therefore, education, literacy, and learning are a divine imperative. And that's why they established Harvard.

Harvard was a school designed to train ministers to study the Bible and spread its truth. Harvard then encouraged the development of other universities like Yale and Princeton. Collectively, they would be known as the Ivy League. This is how the Ivy League started: because America was founded as a religious colony and everyone needed to read the Bible, they needed places to study it.

Over time, as America became more wealthy, it also became less religious, and the Ivy League became social clubs. These were just places where the rich of America went to become friends and build cohesion. These guys did not study. They drank, they dressed up like girls, they had wild parties, they played football, and they took risks. They became good friends and went on to become the leaders of America.

The Rise of State and Research Universities

As America became much more diverse, bigger, and wealthier, it recognized the need to educate its population and started state schools. You may have heard the term Texas A&M, which means Texas Agricultural and Mechanical. These schools were built to train farmers, engineers, and soldiers—tradespeople—to help grow the American economy. This system was extremely successful. America was able to industrialize very quickly, and most people went to these schools. Only the rich would go to the Ivy League because they were social clubs.

Over time, as America began to industrialize more and more, it recognized it needed science and technology. So, it basically copied the best universities in Germany, which at this time was the main center of science and technology in the world. They built something called research universities. A couple of the first research universities were the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins.

So, around 1900, you had this system: state schools where most people went to learn a trade and get a good job; research universities for those who wanted to be professors or scientists; and social clubs called the Ivy League for the rich. Quite honestly, it was a really good system, and America should have stayed with it.

But who was unhappy about this system? Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. If you think about it, over time, they were becoming less and less relevant. Just because you're rich doesn't mean you're smart. All the smart people were going to Chicago and Johns Hopkins, and we could expect those universities to overtake the Ivy League.

That's why Harvard decided to institute scholarship programs. It wanted to welcome more smart people onto its campus. This created the SAT. The SAT was founded as a scholarship program to identify the best and brightest students from all over America so that they could come to Harvard and help it be the best university in the world.

The Birth of "Holistic" Admissions

Harvard was not happy that the best students were going to Chicago and Johns Hopkins, so they created the SAT, and now the best students were coming to Harvard. Now who's unhappy? The rich kids. The alumni, the legacies. Before, their kids could just go to Harvard and have a great time. Now, it's hard for them to get in. They have to take a test, and they're in class with smarter people.

So now Harvard has a problem. On one hand, it wants the best students in America, but on the other hand, it still wants to maintain good relations with its alumni. That's why it created a new system. In this new system, grades and test scores are not the only factors. Now, it's focused on a holistic review.

Specifically, character. Just being smart is not good enough. You have to be a good person. You have to be a strong, brave, and virtuous person.

They have a new concept called character, but this word was created to basically keep Jews out. Jews are really smart, but Jews like to read books, so they're not good at sports. The thinking was, "That's not good. We need people who are manly, who are strong, who are brave. We need white people." So they developed this holistic system. That's why we have the system we have today, where it's not just test scores but also essays, transcripts, and teacher recommendations—because they wanted to identify the Jews and keep them out. Today, we have this system to identify both Jews and Asians to keep them out. All the information they're looking at today is to identify your ethnicity. They basically want to keep Asians out of Harvard. It's that simple.

The purpose of all these changes is to ensure that Harvard remains the institution of power in America. Harvard is not interested in academics; it's interested in power. Therefore, it must ensure that the people who come to Harvard are the ones who are most likely to succeed. That's why it doesn't want all Asians; it wants a mix of students.

In this new system, there are two key concepts. The first is secrecy. Secrecy just means, "I'll never tell you why I let you in or why I didn't let you in. I don't have to." The other is the idea of discretion. Discretion means that I can choose to let you in for no reason. In China, if you get a really high score on the Gaokao, a top university has to let you in. Not in America. You can be the best student in the world; they don't care if they don't like you. They'll just say, "We don't want you." They have their own institutional reasons, and they'll never tell you.

This system was created to ensure that Harvard is able to recruit the best students in the world. But what's important for us to remember is that from Harvard's perspective, "best" just means the most likely to succeed, not necessarily the most academically oriented or smartest student.

A Thought Experiment: Who Gets Into Harvard?

Let's run a thought experiment. Let's say that you are a Harvard admissions officer presented with four students, and you can only let in one.

The best math genius from China.
The best basketball player in America.
The best student in the world.
A legacy student from three generations of Harvard graduates.

Who do you let in? You let in number four. You know that in the world, he is the most likely to succeed. You're not interested in educating smart people; all you want to do is graduate rich people.

But let's just say the legacy student doesn't exist. Then who do you let in? The basketball player. Definitely not the math genius from China, because you know he'll probably just be a math professor. We don't want professors. We don't want lawyers. We don't want doctors. We want people who will be head of a company, who will become a famous rock star, who will become president of the United States. That's what we want. We want the other top students to apply because that helps us look better. We want people to apply so we can reject them so that our metrics look better.

Harvard as a Venture Capital Firm

The best analogy for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton is a venture capital firm. You're an investment firm. Let's pretend you're a venture capitalist, and I give you two options.

Option 1: I want to open a restaurant and I need a million dollars. My uncle works for the government, so I can guarantee that he and his friends will come to my restaurant every single day. There's absolutely no risk involved. I guarantee we'll make at least $500,000 a year. No risk, easy money.
Option 2: I want to start a website that's AI and Bitcoin and all this. The problem is, I don't even know how to write code. I have no experience building a website, and my idea isn't really fleshed out. But if it works, we can make $1 billion.

Which option do you take? You always take the second one. You don't need $500,000; that's boring. You want a billion dollars, and that's the mentality of Harvard. They want to take a risk on you. They don't want students who are solid and who become a professor. That's boring. They want crazy people who will change the world because that makes Harvard look good.

They would rather have a class where 10 people succeed and 999 fail than a class where a thousand people succeed slightly.

Why? Because we only remember the 10 people who succeed. We forget everyone else. That's the Harvard mentality, and that's why they're the most famous university in the world—they're looking to create as much brand name recognition for themselves as possible.

The Ideal Candidate: A Case Study

How do they know if you'll succeed? They look for a specific characteristic: dissociative personality disorder. I'll explain why using myself as an example because I got into Yale. We're going to examine my application to Yale and then look at how the admissions officers would perceive it and judge my potential.

What My Application Actually Said:

I went to a good, but not private, public high school in Canada.
I was in the top 10 of 200 kids, but not number one or two. I was number 10.
My SAT was 1400 out of 1600—decent, but not exceptional.
I was on the soccer team (not athletic, they just needed players).
I was editor of the school newspaper and captain of a quiz team. These activities are fine, but they don't demonstrate major leadership potential.
My essay was about the physicist Richard Feynman. It was a really boring essay.
My teachers liked me but didn't really like me because I seemed aggressive. The word they used was ambitious, which is a dirty word in Canada. It means you don't play by the rules, you're too aggressive, too pushy.

As you can see, it was a decent but not a stellar application. So, how did I get in? Because there was other information they could derive from the application that made them interested in me.

My Background:

I was poor and had to apply for an application fee waiver.
I was an immigrant, born in China in 1976, and my family moved to Canada in 1983 when I was six.
I transferred high schools. I was in a poor high school and then went to a rich high school in a different neighborhood. Canadians don't like that; they want you to stay where you are.
When I told my principal I was transferring, he got very upset and put a discipline letter in my file, which is a very serious thing.
At the rich high school, I had no friends. They didn't like me because I was new, I didn't know their culture, and I was ambitious and grade-grubbing. I was desperate because my family was very poor and I wanted a better life.

They knew all this. They knew I was an average student and that I was pushy and ambitious. And that's why Yale let me in: because it was clear from this information that I had dissociative personality disorder. What does that mean?

I was desperate. If I didn't get into Yale, I felt like I would drown. It was a life-or-death issue for me. They can see that desperation. They want that.
I was insecure. If you're an insecure person, you're not happy with who you are. There's a void in your heart, and the way to fill it is through achievement. If I made a million dollars, I wouldn't be happy; I'd need to make $2 million. An insecure person sees the world as a competition and is always achieving.
I was not a moral person. I was ready to break the rules to succeed. I was not supposed to leave my poor high school and go to the rich high school. That's breaking the rules in Canada. It's not illegal, but you're not supposed to do it. I didn't care. The principal said I couldn't do it; I told him to screw off. At the rich high school, everyone said I wasn't welcome; I said I didn't care.

They saw the desperation, the insecurity, the hunger, and the immorality. This is all part of dissociative personality disorder. And that's why they let me in. It's possible I could go crazy or become depressed, but it's also possible I could change the world. That's how they think. They're a venture capital firm looking for the riskiest investment with the best possible return.

Why are Ivy League graduates so successful?

When you do investment, you don't make only risky investments; you have diversity in your portfolio. The majority of students are still students who will be successful no matter what because their families are rich. Those are the safe investments. Then you have about 1% of positions for people like me, where you don't really know, but there's potential. It's a crapshoot. It's all intuition. They think, "This guy is interesting. Let's just let him in." They have that 1% of positions available for risk.

The Meritocracy Creates Trauma

The problem with this system is that because Yale, Harvard, and Princeton are so powerful, not only are they looking for people with trauma, but they're also traumatizing the world. The meritocracy exists to find people with trauma, and because it exists, it's traumatizing the world.

At the University Level:When you get into Yale, it's actually the Hunger Games. It is a relentless competition. Once you're in Yale, you're still competing, but now you're competing against the most competitive people in the world. You go to Yale and recognize that you're a nobody. You're in competition with the best students from all around the world who all want to kill you because it's a zero-sum game. In the classroom, it's a seminar style where you're all competing to impress a professor. Outside the classroom, you're competing to get into clubs, secret societies, and for graduate school scholarships. From the first day, it's an endless pursuit of achievement. This is very traumatic and makes you so insecure that you go through life thinking everyone's an enemy. People who graduate from Yale have a deep sense of insecurity, even those from the wealthiest families. They're always looking to achieve, and that's what Yale wants.

At the High School Level:To get into Yale, you have to go through high school, and high school has to train you for Yale. So, it's also a competition, also a Hunger Games.

At the Parenting Level:To train you for high school, your parents have to adopt a different parenting system.

Healthy System: You say to your child, "I love you unconditionally. No matter what you do, I will support you." If you say that to your child every day, your child will be happy, fulfilled, and secure. But that person will probably end up as a teacher.
Traumatic System: You say to your child, "I don't have time for you, but if you win the swimming competition or place first on your math test, I'll take you for ice cream." It's a system that neglects the child while at the same time making demands of the child. This is trauma.

Most kids will be traumatized by this system, but some kids will thrive, and the trauma will drive them to achieve and achieve so they can get into Yale and compete in the Hunger Games. This is what we call the meritocracy. It started at Harvard, but now it has conquered the entire world, and that's why the world is so messed up.

The Data: A Society in Decline

The best universities in the world are now in America. As universities get better, they're letting in more students. In 1940, only about 5% of all males went to university; today, it's almost 35%. You would think that with the increase in college graduates, America would become a much more equal society. The opposite has happened.

Inequality: America has become a much more unequal society. The Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, has gone way up in the past 20 years. America is now one of the most unequal societies in the world.
Social Mobility: In 1940, most people were doing better than their parents. Over time, that has reversed. Your generation will likely not do better than your parents.
Wealth Concentration: Income inequality has gone way up. The top 1% controls most of the wealth in the United States.
Student Debt: Universities are becoming much more expensive, leading to a crisis in student debt. In America, student loans are the only type of debt you can never get rid of, not even through bankruptcy. When you die, it passes on to your children.
Depression: This is leading to depression among teenagers. The middle class and wealthy students are much more likely to be depressed than poor students.

Two individuals created this meritocracy. The first is James B. Conant, president of Harvard for a couple of decades. He was the person who brought in the SAT and was determined to make Harvard an institution of power in America. The man who helped him was Henry Chauncey, who was dean of Harvard and then got a new job at a new organization called ETS (Educational Testing Service). They are the ones responsible for the SAT, the TOEFL, the AP, and the GRE. Together, these two created the modern meritocracy, and the entire system is set up to benefit Harvard.

And it worked.

In 1940, 90% of applicants to Harvard were accepted. Now, it's down to 5%.
Harvard's endowment is about $40 billion. They have more money than most countries.
Harvard graduates the most billionaires in America—127 in 2024.
7% of all people in America with over $100 million in net worth graduated from Harvard. The rest of the top schools are the Ivy League plus MIT and Stanford.

It's not just rich people; it's the entire American elite. A study in Nature looked at all the elites in America and discovered most of them went to a handful of elite universities. Harvard graduates are everywhere: generals, admirals, philosophers, professors, Pulitzer Prize winners, billionaires, Fortune 500 CEOs, federal judges, and senators. Harvard and the Ivy League dominate America today.

What's amazing is that Harvard people don't know they dominate. A survey asked people in elite organizations how many of their colleagues went to elite universities. Their estimates were far lower than the actual numbers. They genuinely don't even know they dominate America.

A Rigged Game: From Secret Societies to the White House

At Harvard, it's not enough to just attend; you have to join the elite social clubs or secret societies. At Yale, it's Skull and Bones, the most famous college secret society. They are so powerful that they produce presidents and many rich people. In the 2004 presidential election, both George W. Bush (the Republican nominee) and John Kerry (the Democratic nominee) were from Yale and members of Skull and Bones. It's a rigged game.

Barack Obama went to Columbia and Harvard Law School. He promised hope and change in 2008, telling people the game was rigged against them and that he would be their champion. He won because, in 2008, the US economy collapsed. Why? Because the US banks and the political system were controlled by Ivy League graduates who were all friends with each other. They cheated and became corrupt, destroying the American economy.

People protested, and Obama promised to do something about it. His economic team included Larry Summers, a Harvard graduate and former president of Harvard, and Tim Geithner, a Dartmouth graduate. These were friends of Wall Street who came in to save Wall Street. Critics said that Wall Street created the mess and should be punished. If you just bail them out, you create a problem called moral hazard—the idea that if there are no consequences for your mistakes, you will do it again.

Larry Summers argued they had to save the American economy, not just the banks. But when critics asked about helping American homeowners who had lost their homes, Summers's response was: moral hazard. If we help out ordinary Americans, they won't learn anything.

The banks got saved, and the people got screwed over. Because of this, we got Donald Trump. Millions of Americans who voted for Obama because he promised hope and change then voted for Trump because he promised to destroy the system.

This political class is filled with soulless robots. JD Vance, Donald Trump's running mate, wrote a bestseller called Hillbilly Elegy. He initially opposed Trump, calling him a fascist, and then suddenly changed his opinion and said Trump was the greatest guy in the world. These people, like Vance and Obama, have no ideas of their own. They are puppets who tell people what they want to hear. All they know is achievement.

Another example is Johnny Kim. He will probably run for president one day. He was a Navy SEAL, went to Harvard Medical School to become a doctor, and then joined NASA to become an astronaut. This is the ideal Ivy League graduate. Why was he able to do all this? In 2002, when he was a child, the police came to his house and killed his father, who was a violent domestic abuser, right in front of him. He was traumatized for life. He has dissociative personality disorder. If you look at most of these really successful people, they have it. He turned that trauma into an energy to drive him to greater and greater achievement. The problem is, he has no ideas of his own. He's just a puppet.

The Destruction Wrought by Meritocracy

Let's summarize why the meritocracy is so destructive.

Extreme Inequality: It has destroyed the American dream and social mobility while concentrating wealth and power in the top 1%.
Destroyed Education: It destroyed the school system because all people care about now are grades, not learning. If a teacher tries to challenge you, you'll just complain.
Traumatized Children: Look at the rates of mental illness in China and America; it's insane.
Political Division and Corruption: It has fueled the political divide between left and right, while Wall Street steals and steals with no consequences.
Incompetent Elite: It has produced an elite that is soulless, mediocre, and unimaginative, leading to mismanagement on issues like COVID and a national debt of $37 trillion.

Thank you, American meritocracy, for destroying the world.

Is there a way to fix this?

The real solution is to destroy the Ivy League. The best way is to make them public, for the government to come in and control them. Because they are private, they only care about their own power. If the government were in charge, they wouldn't be so powerful and secretive. But that's not going to happen because Harvard and Yale are too powerful.

As an individual, your best option is to recognize how evil the system is and choose to learn for yourself. When you go to Yale or Harvard, you think you're learning, but you're not. You're being indoctrinated, brainwashed, and traumatized to be turned into a robot that's only focused on success. You need to recognize this and focus on real learning.

Before the meritocracy, real success required certain values and attitudes.

Be open-minded. Recognize that you have a lot to learn and ask questions.
Embrace failure. People recognized that failure is the best teacher because it forces reflection and builds resilience, which leads to learning.

This was the model most people understood. Keep an open mind, make mistakes, learn from them, reflect, become resilient, and grow to achieve your true potential. The meritocracy has destroyed this system because now we just want you to focus on grades. To get good grades, you cannot fail. Failure is now a problem. If you fail a class, you may learn a lot, but it will destroy your GPA, and you won't get into Harvard. Without failure, you cannot have reflection or resilience.

Furthermore, you don't have time for yourself anymore. Every minute is organized for you. You don't have time to just think for yourself, to just chill and do what you want to do. This is intentional. It destroys reflection.

If you're like me—a normal person from a family that's not rich or powerful—and you go to Harvard or Yale, it actually makes you fail in life. It makes you arrogant, thinking you know more than everyone else. It makes you utilitarian, only caring about things that help you succeed, not real learning. And it makes you narrow-minded because all you care about is success, so you don't want to explore or be creative.

It's a great system if you come from a rich family because it trains you to go into power. But if you need to work hard and be talented and committed to your passion to succeed, this system destroys all that. That's why most of the traumatized people in America are those who came from poor families, got into the Ivy League, and then failed in life because they don't have the ability to succeed. They aren't open-minded, they don't accept failure, and they're only committed to success, not learning.

For me, it was a mistake. After I graduated, I stumbled through life with failure after failure because I wanted to succeed right away. I refused to put in the time and effort to learn a real skill. In my late 20s and early 30s, I became really depressed and thought about killing myself. I was traumatized by it. It took me a long time to get over the trauma and recognize this is a false system. Yale traumatized me, and I needed to relearn how to be open-minded, embrace failure, be resilient, and embrace learning. That's why I'm a teacher today: to teach you that to be successful in life, this is the formula. You don't need Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.