Meritocracy presents itself as a neutral principle of justice: positions and rewards should track desert, effort, and demonstrated capability. This paper argues that meritocracy as actually practiced is not a neutral allocative mechanism but a structure of command — a system that systematically produces agency collapse (Smax) in identifiable categories of persons, then legitimizes that collapse as deserved. The argument proceeds through two movements. The first develops the UNS (Negative Utilitarianism of Separateness) critique of meritocratic distribution across four theses: The distinction between functional competence and allocative power — demonstrating that meritocratic ideology conflates task-fitness with social entitlement. The function of meritocratic narrative as a blocking mechanism — showing how desert attribution pre-empts the corrective responses that would interrupt descent toward Smax. The structural clustering of corrosive disadvantages — drawing on Wolff and de-Shalit to explain how meritocratic institutions produce cascading deprivation. The three-level causal mechanism — specifying the narrative, institutional, and psychological pathways through which meritocracy produces rather than merely correlates with agency collapse, and formulating the UNS causal claim in its defensible conditional form (structural tendency under conditions of positional scarcity). The second movement responds systematically to five objections: the efficiency objection (who will choose competent practitioners?), the luck-egalitarian responsibility objection (what about voluntary choices?), the moral-hazard objection (the market needs price signals), the paternalism objection (treating workers as lacking agency), and the over-demandingness objection (Smax as contingent misfortune rather than structural output). In each case, the objection either presupposes the very agency that Smax destroys, fails to account for the structural production of collapse, or misidentifies the conditional nature of the UNS causal claim. The paper concludes with a note on the transitional problem — how to construct the Lexical Shield without reproducing command — and the logic of federated Non-Command zones as sites of interdictive force and mutual aid.
Tommaso Biagi (Sat,) studied this question.