Dr. Summer Inverness – 28/05/2026
Novella City, Burgess, Novella Islands
Novellan National News Service
Dr. Summer Inverness is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Novella Islands University of Humanities. Writing for Common Mind, she argues that meritocracy’s reach into Novellan civic vocabulary is a cultural failure no legislative amendment can correct.
What meritocracy owes the mediocre
The flinch is unmistakable. Use the word “mediocre” of a Novellan citizen in conversation, whether a colleague, a neighbour, or a relative, and observe what happens to the room. The flinch is near-universal, even among those who would otherwise consider themselves free of the prejudices the Republic teaches us to interrogate. It is not, in standard usage, a response to a term of vulgar insult. “Mediocre” is, etymologically and historically, a term of placement. The middle of the range. The median Novellan, by definition, is mediocre. Half of us sit below the median, by any metric one cares to apply, and another fraction sit on it. We are, statistically and ordinarily, a republic of the mediocre, and apparently we cannot even say so without giving offence.
I want to take that flinch seriously, as data. It is the surface symptom of something the Republic does not like to admit: that the vocabulary by which we describe ourselves as citizens has come to do moral work the Fourth Tenet’s machinery was never designed to authorise. The citizen who completed civic service competently, who has held a lesser-competitive role for thirty years, who has raised the median across a thousand small institutional encounters without ever clearing a competitive threshold, is, in our standing public language, defined by what they did not do. They did not advance. They did not pass. They are not, in the specialised sense the Fourth Tenet attaches to authority, stewards. The framing is in what they are not. That is the flinch’s evidentiary content.
Where the argument is most easily mishandled is in the conclusion drawn from that context. The obvious reading is that the Fourth Tenet’s competitive vocabulary has colonised our moral vocabulary, and that the cure must accordingly be institutional. I want to argue the opposite. The flinch is evidence of something older than the Republic’s architecture; something the architecture inherited from a civic culture that long preceded it, and something the architecture has done about as much to mitigate as institutions can honestly be asked to do. What remains, after the institutional case has been honestly examined, is ours.
The cadre and the candidate
The cleanest way to test the proposition that meritocracy is the source of the pathology is to examine a Novellan civic order in which meritocracy was absent. The Federation era is ripe to furnish such a case, with civil service positions openly bought and sold, and where the register in which citizens addressed each other tracked the inherited class divisions of franchise and means. However, I want to instead examine the Communist Union, because it offers a control of a more probative kind, as the order our own architecture directly replaced, whose population transitioned without rupture into the present Republic. If the pathology survived that direct lineage, the inheritance is not theoretical.
The Communist Union, in the century between the 1877 Revolution and the 1969 Referendum, did not select its civil servants by examination. Promotion was political. Advancement was conditional on standing within the Party, ideological reliability, and the patronage of cadres higher in the apparatus than oneself. The Fourth Tenet, as we now read it, did not yet exist in operational form; the historical record gives no comfort to those who would argue it ever did, in practice, during the cadre era. Whatever else one wishes to say about the Communist Union (and we say a great deal of it, mostly correctly), the claim that it elevated a class of citizens on the basis of demonstrated competence cannot be sustained.
Now ask the question this piece exists to ask. Was the median citizen of the Communist Union spared the cultural vocabulary I am describing? Was “non-cadre” a neutral descriptive term? Was the worker who kept a factory running, but who never made the slate for Party advancement, addressed by their fellow citizens as a steward of the common life? They were not. The archive of that century is, in this respect, depressingly continuous with the present. The vocabulary of civic worth tracked the vocabulary of advancement, and the worker who fell short of cadre standing was held to have fallen short in a way that meant something about them. The selection criterion changed in 1969. The equation between standing and worth did not.
The Fourth Tenet’s machinery distributes administrative authority on the basis of demonstrated competence for specified roles. It does not – and on its own terms, cannot – distribute civic worth, which is not a quantity any examination could measure, and not a quantity the Constitution treats as differentially distributed among citizens at all. The institution’s claim is that the candidate who scores higher in a research-stream qualification is more competent at research-stream work. It makes no claim, and the Constitution authorises no claim, about whether that candidate is a more valuable citizen than one who did not sit the examination, or even one who sat it and failed. The cultural equation of the one with the other is therefore not a downstream effect of the meritocracy doing its work correctly. It is the citizenry doing something the meritocracy never condoned, and which the meritocracy itself, examined honestly, refuses.
This is the first move I want the reader to accept. Meritocracy is not the cause. Meritocracy is the contemporary occasion for a pre-republican mistake.
What our institutions actually do
A civic order at the scale of a nation cannot avoid ranking. The Federation era ranked by inherited class and material wealth; the Communist Union ranked by cadre patronage; the Social Republic ranks by competitive examination of competence. The structural feature these three orders share is not the criterion of selection, but the existence of any criteria at all. This is the unavoidable condition of organising a civic order at this scale. The question the Republic faces, having inherited a population that already knew how to mistake standing for worth, is not whether to rank, but how. The Fourth Tenet’s answer – competitive selection by demonstrated competence, perpetually examined, transparently reviewed, swiftly correctable – is the most defensible answer. It is not, however, a different kind of answer from the ones it replaced, and pretending otherwise would invite dishonesty.
The Unified Civil Service Examination, the Technocratic Promotion Regulations 1971, and the broader machinery built on them have done what they were designed to do. They have produced a public administration of demonstrable competence, broadly free of patronage, defensibly fair in its selection criteria, and continuously subject to review. The Sixth Tenet’s audit framework keeps the machinery honest. The Civil Service Commission’s appellate function gives the citizen recourse where selection has gone wrong. These institutions are not flawed in their internal operation, and their results are nothing less than a substantial civic achievement. The Fourth Tenet is, on its own terms, a triumph.
What is more, the Republic’s constitutional architecture has never placed the Fourth Tenet’s competitive selection alone at the apex of civic authority. The National Civic Council, the lay judge system, and the broader stratified sortition apparatus exist as the Constitution’s deliberate counterweight, drawing ordinary citizens into civic-authoritative positions on grounds entirely independent of examination performance. The Council deliberates without credentialing. Lay judges sit alongside professional ones, and the law accords their judgment weight that does not depend on any rank-ordered table. These are not the architecture’s consolations to the unselected. They are substantive positions of civic authority designed to be filled by citizens who, in the Fourth Tenet’s specialised sense, are precisely not stewards. The original drafters of the Constitution, and the citizens of the amendments of 2024 after them, understood that authority distributed wholly through competitive selection would produce exactly the cultural concentration I am concerned with, and they built the counterweight into the architecture before the rest of us were old enough to need it.
The architecture has thought about the problem I am describing. It has produced a Fourth Tenet that distributes authority where authority can be earned by examination, a sortition apparatus that distributes authority where it cannot, and a Seventh Tenet framework that ensures material, educational, and social provision for every citizen regardless of which of those channels they pass through. Where the institutional reach extends, the institutional reach has been deployed, and deployed well. There is no obvious unutilised lever I could ask the National Assembly to pull, nor even any hypothetical amendment to be made to the Constitution itself.
I labour this point because the conclusion I am moving toward requires it. If the architecture’s own answer to the concern I am raising has already been operationalised – and I believe it has – then whatever remains of the pathology must lie outside the architecture’s domain.
The Seventh Tenet, read honestly
It is in the Seventh Tenet that the residue actually surfaces.
The text reads, “progress is judged not by growth or efficiency alone, but by the inclusive, concrete betterment of every person’s material, emotional, and cultural life”. That sentence has typically been read, since the amendment in 2024 enshrined it, as the constitutional anchor for the Republic’s welfare provision. I do not dispute the reading. The social programs that flowed from the referendum are commendable achievements, and the Seventh Tenet’s material clause has been operationalised about as completely as any text of that generality can be by statute.
Read the sentence again, however, and notice what else it is doing. It establishes a criterion for the assessment of progress, in “every person”. It includes “emotional” and “cultural” life alongside the material. It is “concrete betterment”, not statistical aggregate adequacy. The Seventh Tenet, read honestly, is not exhausted by welfare provision. It is a constraint on what the Republic is permitted to call progress, and a constraint that reaches dimensions of civic life that no welfare statistic measures.
This is where the flinch returns, and where the elimination argument lands. If a Novellan civic order without meritocracy produced the same vocabulary, then meritocracy in and of itself is not the cause. If the Fourth Tenet’s institutions are themselves sound, and the sortition counterweights are in place, then the architecture has done what it can reasonably be asked to do. If the Seventh Tenet’s material clause is satisfied, then the welfare ledger is settled. What remains, after each of those eliminations, is the cultural clause; and the cultural clause is not satisfied. The Republic provides for its citizens. Its citizens, having been provided for, then turn to one another and use a vocabulary inherited from a civic order that no longer exists, to do moral work the institutions never intended.
That residue, and only that residue, is what this piece is concerned with. It is the work the architecture has correctly identified as beyond its reach.
The Republic’s institutions are not failing to address this. They are correctly declining to. Conversational vocabulary between citizens is not a domain into which institutional governance can extend, without becoming something other than itself, without contravening the very principles the institutions exist to uphold. The First Tenet’s primacy of evidence and reason cannot be enforced into private speech, without ceasing to be the First Tenet (notwithstanding instances such as the Misinformation and Disinformation Prohibition Act 2007, which regulates public falsehood of consequence, not the registers in which one citizen addresses another). The Third Tenet’s duty to correct falsehood cannot be assigned to a regulatory body without ceasing to be a citizen’s duty, and becoming an administrative function. The Seventh Tenet’s cultural clause names a dimension of civic life that institutions can support but cannot, without violating themselves, govern. This is not a failure of the architecture, but its intelligence. It has identified the limit of its own reach, and has done so on principled grounds.
What statutes and institutions cannot correct
What I have come to think is that the philosopher’s contribution to a cultural problem of this kind is not to propose an institutional remedy where the institutions have correctly stopped, nor to issue a generic call to better behaviour in the hope that exhortation will land. It is to name the pathology precisely enough that citizens can recognise themselves doing it.
That is what this article is. The Third Tenet binds every citizen to correct falsehood where they find it, and the falsehood I am naming is the quiet equation of competitive standing with civic worth: an equation we inherited from a civic order that no longer exists, that survived the institutional revolution of 1969, and that the Seventh Tenet’s cultural clause obliges us to dismantle in the only domain where it now lives. That domain is conversational.
There is, in fact, an institution that already does a version of this work, though is not an institution of the state in any of the senses I have been discussing. The national teahouse is a civic space, publicly provided, but what happens inside it is not administered. The retired engineer and the undergraduate sit at the same table, on the same terms, and what registers between them is not rank, not examination result, not the competitive standing either of them holds in any Fourth Tenet ranking table. Instead, it is attention; the quality of what one says to the person across the table, and the seriousness with which one listens. The teahouse already practises, without instruction, the conversational mode the Seventh Tenet’s cultural clause is asking for. The teahouse furnishes what the rest of conversational life does not, in providing a room whose institutional norms hold competitive standings in suspension for the duration of one’s sitting at the table. The productive noise of the place is the audible evidence of that suspension.
The work I am describing is not to invent something the Republic lacks. It is to extend what the Republic already does in one room, at one table, over one pot of tea, into the rest of its conversational life.
That is what meritocracy owes the mediocre. Not better consolation, not better audits, not new institutional remedies. The dignified attention of every superlative citizen toward the mediocre, and of every mediocre citizen toward themselves and each other. The Republic’s architecture has done its part, and the rest is ours.
