Even more directly: on the antagonistic relationship between capitalism and meritocracy

Ideal merit: each person is rewarded for how much they contribute to a society (except for individuals who cannot contribute for some health reason).

Current impediment: capitalism, because, in this socioeconomic system, most of those who are most rewarded are not, individually and proportionally, those who contribute the most to society.

For, according to ideal merit, the existence of super-rich and super-poor would not be possible, because most people, individually and proportionally, contribute in a more modest way to the society or community in which they live. Even individuals who are exceptionally proactive, who delegate a disproportionate amount of positive contributions (in a true or objective-impartial/rational sense), would still not be rewarded to the same extreme level as the ultra-rich of the past and of our era. So, what makes this false "mathematics" of greatly exaggerated proportions possible is monetary fiction, in which, through its fantasy, it "becomes possible" to multiply (imaginary) gains to the stratosphere. If, through proportional mathematics, rooted in the "world of realities", an ideally meritocratic society would come closer to the ideal of a socialist or communist society, at least in relation to its emphasis on social equality. In conclusion, it would not be wrong to think that monetary fiction has been used as the most important means of exponential accumulation of power, even as a way of imposing an ideology, structured in a hierarchy of symbols, in which ordinary individuals are indoctrinated to accept their condition of subordination and to treat as a concrete reality this distance forged between them and the top of the social pyramid, as if it were physically unattainable. Therefore, the capitalist system seems to maximize this very human tendency to treat symbols as concrete elements or real dimensions.