We are often told to beware those who seek the easy way. But I would add, beware those who accept only the hard way, for they have chosen to make the accumulation of merit the focus, even the whole point, of their lives. Merit thrives on difficulty—indeed, cannot be produced without it.
And what is merit? Let us not confuse it with virtue. Virtue, or perhaps virtues in the plural, might be described as the powers to do or be good. Analogously, a person might go for a walk to sustain or improve her powers of locomotion. Of course, going for a walk can be, should be, of itself a good thing. So, her walk has two purposes then. But what if she views her walk as meritorious as well? Merit comes in when she expects something from some unspecified or transcendent source for this action, as opposed to simply improved health or the pleasure of a Summer’s day. She might not even expect to get this something. She may be satisfied with, even prefer, that she simply deserve it. A debt is owed her, and that debt takes no particular form, but is in fact pure debt.
Of course, if she is religious, she will likely be thinking of receiving God’s commendation. But it is not necessary for her to be at all religious in order to have, even if not consciously, an almost religious devotion to her own merit. Lacanian psychology, for example, speaks of the “Big Other,” an entity in the psyche for whom one is in effect performing, whom one wishes to impress. This entity could be God, a parent, a historical figure, an influential person from one’s life, etc.
In critiquing merit, I do not intend to disparage the general idea of an exchange in favor of some more altruistic or unselfish motive for doing everything. That is not the issue here. What is at stake is this quasi-mystical bartering as the center of life: that is to say, a frame of mind which says I have the power of doing good, and will choose to exercise it to gain this ghostly merit: in other words, to put the beyond into my debt.
For merit is nothing of itself (again, it is not to be confused with virtue, or with good character, for example) but is rather, a kind of promissory note.
And in this sense, merit is much like money—is perhaps its foundation or prototype, or progenitor. They have similar tendencies, especially when we look at money in capitalism. Merit might be described as value in the spiritual realm, without being spirit, just as capital is value in the material realm without being material.
For in capitalism, one increases one’s capital for this reason: to invest and in turn increase one’s capital further, and to no known limit. Capital, which can be used rationally to purchase use values, is used to increase itself, and to that end in itself, rather than to the purchase of more use values. Use values are subordinated to exchange values in the most idiotic and indeed nihilistic philosophy humanity may yet have devised.
Likewise, with merit. Those who seek merit do not desire to trade it for something else they supposedly really want. They want the merit itself.
The pursuit of merit, which may actually be, or at least bear a strong connection to the sin of pride, is the spiritual foundation of the very material practice of capitalism. (Why is pride a sin? Perhaps because it seeks to put God in one’s debt, and therefor completely misunderstands the nature of God and humanity.) Many generations before Adam Smith or his contemporaries, religious people of various sorts were pursuing merit. The wiser amongst them would be alert to this tendency in themselves, this wandering from the path of virtue, in effect, and adjust themselves accordingly as far as possible.
But just as merit is a ghostly thing, a promissory note that can never keep its promise, so is capital. Pride and capital know no natural bounds, and thus, as we see in environmental destruction, for example, destroy nature itself.