This was something I was thinking should be memified / rendered into an infographic.

Meritocracies tend to have blind-spots regarding certain folks:

• The merits of people who do useful stuff not recognized with reward or compensation, or are under-compensated (e.g. parenting, teaching)
• People who subvert the system, often playing to the measures of merit rather than the spirit (e.g. private equity schemes, MLMs, cults, lobbyists, trillion-dollar far-right hate-based propaganda machines)
• People who have characteristics beyond their merits that are favorable (white, male, related to wealthy families), or unfavorable (nonwhites, women, queer, poor, fat, unattractive, strange cultures and religions, outside the mainstream ideology)
• The personhood of those people who genuinely have little or no merit at this time (disabled folk), some of whom have served (enlisted veterans suffering from TBI or PTSD, or were just blackballed by a superior officer with a grudge) or have the potential to serve (children of the wrong color, children who are below average in physical prowess, children with unusual learning styles, weird children, poor children)

Probably not a complete list. Early draft.