Intelligence, Merit, and AI: The Collapse of a Cultural Illusion
For centuries, societies have relied on the presumption that “intelligence” is a natural marker of “merit”—a justification for status, wealth, authority, and influence. Intelligence has been coded as a scarce resource, a sacred trait that legitimizes power and hierarchy. The smarter you are, the more you deserve. The greater your intelligence, the greater your right to influence and reward.
This logic has been particularly influential in justifying the special status of the managerial and executive class. These roles have been elevated on the assumption that they require rare and exceptional intelligence—the capacity to “see the big picture,” to “strategize,” and to “lead.” Managerial power is portrayed as an inevitable outcome of superior cognitive ability, strategic insight, and the ability to manage complexity. This framing is central to how hierarchy justifies itself.
But this foundational myth is collapsing, and AI is accelerating its demise.
The rise of advanced AI systems threatens to expose a long-standing cultural illusion: that intelligence, as traditionally defined, is inherently tied to moral worth, social merit, or deservingness. As AI grows capable of performing tasks historically reserved for the “intelligent”—writing, coding, composing, analyzing, and even strategic planning—it becomes harder to maintain the fiction that these abilities are signs of virtue or deep human value.
The uncomfortable truth is that much of what society has valorized as “intelligence” is reducible to processes of pattern recognition, task execution, and repetition—things AI can now do at scale, without consciousness, morality, or merit. The emergence of AI forces a reckoning: if machines can perform these tasks without deserving status or reward, why have humans—especially the managerial class—been so richly rewarded for doing the same?
Intelligence as Narrative Enclosure
The presumed connection between intelligence and merit has been one of the dominant narrative enclosures of modernity. It is a crypto-theological belief—one that sacralizes intelligence as a marker of human worth, progress, and inevitability. It underwrites the mythology of meritocracy: the belief that those who succeed in society do so because they “deserve” it, because they are smarter, better, more capable.
The executive and managerial class has been the ultimate beneficiary of this mythology. The ability to “lead,” “decide,” and “envision” has been framed as the highest form of intelligence, deserving of the highest rewards. But AI disrupts this story. It reveals that intelligence, at least as measured by performance in certain tasks, is not a marker of moral virtue or social contribution. Intelligence is mechanical, procedural, replicable. Strategic analysis, predictive modeling, and decision optimization—all traits that have been used to justify managerial supremacy—are tasks AI can perform without merit, meaning, or consciousness.
The System’s Defensive Response
Rather than accepting this collapse, we can expect systems of power to respond with narrative defense mechanisms. They will attempt to salvage the illusion of merit by doubling down on new forms of enclosure:
Redefining Merit: Human intelligence will be reframed as more “authentic,” “moral,” or “creative” than machine intelligence. Managerial roles will be mythologized as uniquely dependent on “vision,” “judgment,” or “character” even as these traits become indistinguishable from algorithmic processing.
Moralizing AI: The narrative will shift to portray AI as dangerous, lacking in humanity, and morally suspect. The system will suggest that humans, by virtue of their inherent moral character, deserve continued power and reward, even as AI performs the labor they once did.
Elevating Control Over Merit: As the illusion of intelligence collapses, systems will seek legitimacy not by claiming moral merit but by emphasizing control. The right to wield AI will become the new ground of social privilege. Those who “control the risk” will claim the right to control the rewards.
Gatekeeping Creativity and Leadership: There will be a renewed effort to protect traditional markers of human leadership and vision, not by expanding access but by reinforcing institutional control. Only certain decisions, strategies, or insights will be deemed “authentic,” while AI-generated plans will be dismissed as imitation—even though much of managerial decision-making is already patterned, procedural, and derivative.
The Deeper Threat: Revealing Merit as Fiction
But the real threat is not that AI will outcompete humans in the labor market. The deeper threat is that AI will reveal how hollow the merit system has been all along.
If AI can write, code, strategize, or analyze without consciousness or moral character, then why have these capacities been treated as indicators of worth in human societies? Why have they justified higher pay, greater status, or disproportionate power? Why has the managerial class been positioned as inherently deserving of control and reward, when their role has often been to aggregate, process, and replicate information?
The answer is uncomfortable: because intelligence, as it's been socially constructed, has always served as an enclosure. It has been a way to justify and reproduce inequality. It has been a tool to gatekeep who has access to value, reward, and recognition. And AI exposes this mechanism by replicating “intelligent” outputs without any claim to deservingness.
Toward a Post-Merit Framework
This moment demands a radical reframing of how we think about value and worth. If AI shows us that intelligence does not equate to merit, then we must rethink what truly matters in human systems.
Mutuality Over Merit: Value must be rooted in mutual contribution, care, and collective engagement—not in isolated outputs or competitive status. Mutual aid, not performance metrics, becomes the basis for collective thriving.
Plasticity Over Intelligence: The capacity for mutual interpretation, deliberation, and collective problem-solving becomes more important than cognitive speed or technical proficiency. Value emerges from how we hold complexity together, not from how quickly we produce answers.
Collective Emergence Over Individual Genius: Rather than valorizing individual achievement, we can focus on how value emerges through collective processes—how knowledge, care, and meaning are co-constructed in community.
Decentralizing Control: Systems must resist the tendency to reinforce elite control over AI and knowledge production. Instead, they should prioritize shared access, transparency, and collective governance over technological capacities.
The Role of the Communitarium
The Communitarium can be a space where these new frameworks are cultivated. It can be a site where value is defined by mutuality, deliberation, and emergent collective intelligence—not by hierarchical measures of performance or output. It can resist the urge to sacralize “intelligence” as a measure of merit and instead foster spaces where relationality, care, and shared sense-making are the highest forms of contribution.
In the Communitarium, AI is not a threat but an exposer—a force that helps dismantle the myths we have relied on to justify exclusion, inequality, and hierarchy. The challenge is not to preserve the illusion of human merit but to build systems where value is rooted in collective reciprocity and mutual recognition.
Conclusion: The Collapse as Opportunity
The collapse of the intelligence-merit link is an opportunity. It allows us to break with old enclosures and ask deeper questions about what we value, why we value it, and how we might build new systems that reflect mutual care, collective deliberation, and shared flourishing.
AI didn’t break the merit system. It just exposed the fractures that were already there. Now, we face a choice: to double down on the illusions that have sustained inequality, or to begin constructing new, collective counter-enclosures that make space for a genuinely mutual, post-merit future.