Global Meet-Up #8 (Hong Kong): The Occult of the Meritocracy

Summary

Central Argument: Meritocracy Is Failing

The speaker argues that the meritocratic education system—where high test scores and admission to elite universities are treated as evidence of who should lead society—is not as fair or beneficial as it appears. He identifies three main problems:

• It rewards a narrow set of abilities. The system heavily favors IQ, memory, logic, and standardized-test performance, while giving less weight to curiosity, emotional intelligence, practical skills, and other strengths.
• It discourages intellectual openness. In his view, students at elite universities often prioritize career credentials and avoiding failure over curiosity, experimentation, open debate, and learning from mistakes. He says this produces many professionals but too few public intellectuals.
• It intensifies competition and harms childhood. Parents feel pressure to build children’s résumés from an early age, leaving less time for play, independence, and failure. The speaker links this pressure to burnout and poor mental health.

He also questions whether society should devote so many resources to a small academic elite. As an alternative, he points to vocational education and a broader mix of educational institutions, including schools for practical training as well as research and academic study.

Personal Experience With Education

The speaker recounts growing up in a poor Cantonese family, immigrating to Toronto at age six without speaking English, and struggling at school. His mother allowed him to choose whether to move back a grade, even though his teacher advised it. Later, a substitute teacher encouraged him to aim for university. He credits those experiences with helping him value personal agency and encouragement over simply following institutional advice.

He eventually earned a full scholarship to Yale and describes himself as a product of meritocracy. Yet he says he would not want his own children to repeat his experience there, which included alienation and pressure to prove himself.

His Proposed Occult History of Meritocracy

The speaker offers a speculative account linking modern education to religious and occult ideas:

• He describes medieval Europe as shaped by the belief that earthly life was fallen and that people should endure it in preparation for spiritual reward.
• He presents the Reformation and later movements—including Freemasonry and Romanticism—as part of a revolt against religious and social authority, with modernity bringing the idea that humans could build a better world on Earth.
• He says Kabbalistic and Gnostic ideas influenced a vision in which humanity could help repair the world and bring about a perfected society.
• In his account, reason became a means of realizing that vision. He connects the rise of standardized testing and meritocracy to efforts to identify people considered especially capable of reason and place them in influential positions.
• He interprets the SAT and IQ as tools in this project, while arguing that IQ is a limited and exclusionary measure.
• He suggests that, in his interpretation, the same ideal is now being pursued through AI and data systems: rather than reshape people through schools, powerful actors may use AI to guide behavior and expand monitoring. These claims are presented as his theory, not established facts.

Children, Learning, and Purpose

The speaker challenges three common assumptions about children:

1. Children are blank slates to be filled with information. He argues instead that children already have their own awareness, judgment, and inner life.
2. Children are miniature versions of their parents. He cautions against using children to fulfill parents’ unrealized ambitions.
3. Critical thinking and creativity are best taught through reduction and analysis. He argues that conventional instruction often breaks problems into parts and categorizes them, whereas creativity depends more on synthesis, imagination, and intuition.

He describes children as having an innate purpose and says parents should try to understand and support the individual child rather than force that child into a predetermined path. He believes parents are generally best positioned to understand their children, and that the bond between parent and child should be central to social life.

He also argues that family life gave his own life a clearer purpose, helping him move beyond personal ambition and ego. In his view, people without children can find similar meaning through teaching, volunteering, or caring for others.

Proposed Alternative School Model

The speaker proposes that a new kind of school should put the child’s individual purpose and the relationship between parent and child at its center. He identifies three core elements:

• Nature

  • Give children substantial time outdoors, where they can observe, explore, and learn directly from the natural world.
  • Teach practical knowledge, including where food comes from and how to produce it.
  • Reduce reliance on classroom-only learning and abstract instruction.
  • He imagines self-sufficient school communities where adults and children might grow food and produce electricity.

• The occult, religion, and cosmology

  • Explore traditions that address questions such as where people come from, why they are here, and where they are going.
  • Study multiple religious and spiritual traditions rather than treating scientific and mathematical subjects as the sole center of education.
  • In the speaker’s view, a larger account of meaning can help students understand why they are learning.

• The great books

  • Read works such as the Bible, Dante, Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton.
  • The speaker views these works not merely as literature but as ways to engage with profound ideas about human life and the divine.
  • He argues that access to the classics should be democratized rather than restricted to elite universities.

He believes this model could nurture a new generation of thinkers, writers, artists, and intellectuals.

Themes Raised in the Q&A

Audience questions prompted the speaker to expand on several points:

• Access to the classics: He argues that the great books can be read and appreciated by people outside elite universities, citing his teaching experience in China and the audience for his online lectures.
• How his occult thesis connects to social change: He describes the merchant class and transnational capital as forces that weakened older authorities. In his account, “reason” became a legitimizing idea for the expansion of capital, with Freemasonry and related movements serving as vehicles for it.
• What might follow the current system: He predicts a period of disruption and imagines varied forms of social organization, including city-states, corporate or “network” states, religious movements, and AI-enabled systems.
• AI and surveillance: He says AI is less a conscious intelligence than a tool that could support digital identification, currency, tracking, and behavioral profiling.
• Spiritual development: He says people must pursue spiritual understanding for themselves rather than rely on a leader to provide it. He rejects creating a personality cult and says openness and public accountability are important.
• Predictions and trust: He presents public predictions as a way to test his claims and keep himself accountable, while also attributing some of his predictions to spiritual inspiration.
• Family and difficult circumstances: He strongly encourages family and caregiving, but says family need not mean having children. He acknowledges that some parents are abusive or unable to care for their children, though he emphasizes reducing pressures that he believes interfere with family bonds.
• Religion, evil, and resilience: He argues that faith in a forgiving God can help people overcome shame and recover from mistakes. He also suggests that people may reach goodness through difficult or morally troubling experiences.
• Happiness: He defines happiness as living in alignment with one’s body, soul, spirit, and sense of purpose, rather than betraying one’s interests to satisfy outside expectations.

Speakers and Sources Featured

• Main speaker: Professor Jiang, identified in the video context; he gives the lecture and answers questions.
• Other speakers: Unnamed audience members ask questions during the discussion. No other audience member is clearly identified by name in the subtitles.
• People, traditions, and works cited by the speaker: The Bible; Kabbalah; Gnostic and Hermetic philosophy; Freemasonry; Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, and Shinto traditions; John Milton and Paradise Lost; William Blake; Sabbatai Zevi; Jacob Frank; Dante and The Divine Comedy; Homer and The Odyssey and The Iliad; Plato; Shakespeare; Newton; Galileo; Einstein; Moses; Abraham; Jacob; King David; and Elijah.
• Institutions and contemporary figures referenced: Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, McGill, the SAT, ETS, and the Nordic education systems; James B. Conant, Henry Chauncey, Alfred Binet, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Peter Hessler. Some names may be imperfectly rendered in the auto-generated subtitles.