That really is one of the great ironies of the English language. And this is not well known - I didn't know this until a few years ago (maybe on HN?).
I guess the reality is that "meritocracy" is a goal that in practice is hard to achieve. But does that make it the wrong goal? What are better alternatives? How can we fix it? I think it is very, very hard to actually improve on this but I would love to hear suggestions.
Meritocracy is the best -ocracy there is. Which unfortunately isn't enough for human liberation.
In its ideal form meritocracy guarantees that ruling institutions will choose people who maximize some kind of merit function: there are many ideals, however, that aren't incorporated into that. Equality of outcome (an ideal I don't desire, but many people do) inherently contradicts it. Equality of opportunity is a vague and slippery ideal, but whatever it is the absence of it is very compatible with meritocracy. In the end all that ideal meritocracy guarantees is some kind of global merit function that organizations will use to maximize their effectiveness: individuals per se aren't guaranteed anything. And even that weak guarantee ignores huge and intractable political economy issues about whether different interests have commensurable merit functions, the measurability of individual merit, and whether the people implementing the merit function actually implement it according to spec. But those issues aren't going to go away, whatever -ocracy you choose.
And since meritocracy's fundamentally focused on social and organizational needs instead of individual ones, it's plenty compatible with systems that are horrible violations of the principles of the world we want to live in. Imperial China was, supposedly, quite meritocratic: whoever you were, if you did well on imperial exams, you were selected (if you were male and not Miao). The Soviet Union was similar (though those practical issues I mentioned earlier made it de facto more a clientele system). None of us would want to live in either of those systems, though, despite their meritocratic underpinnings.
Assuming that we have to have an -ocracy, though, is a failure of the imagination. If we want something better, I'd say trying to build a decentralized, self-organized, fault-tolerant society without hierarchy is the way to go. Any given organization can fuck up, and most people will end up fine, living in the interstitial spaces between organizations. If someone is unfairly passed over (according to some imagined meritocratic standard), well, it might have wasted a couple hours of their life but isn't the end of the world, because the zero-sum game of having power over other people just isn't played.
I guess the reality is that "meritocracy" is a goal that in practice is hard to achieve. But does that make it the wrong goal? What are better alternatives? How can we fix it? I think it is very, very hard to actually improve on this but I would love to hear suggestions.