The Death of Excellence, the War on Merit and the Destruction of Greatness

By exchanging an ideal of excellence for everyone receiving a medal, whether or not an individual has achieved anything, we are undermining the fundamental tenets of how we built modern society. As we lower our standards to enable everyone to finish a race regardless of performance, we mistakenly think that we uplift the lesser-performing participants. What happens in reality is that we crush those who performed at or above average.

A society that rewards mediocrity to maintain the welfare of the weak has doomed itself to eventual extinction.

In recent years, Western culture has experienced a very disturbing and profound change. The traditional celebration of hard work, extraordinary skill, and individual accomplishments has been replaced with a broad-based philosophy of distrust toward excellence and with the belief that all merit that elevates any individual above another represents an injustice to those who did not achieve this elevation. This philosophy is not only being manifested through changes in how education is being carried out and through the way corporations are hiring employees – although it is slowly changing thankfully! It represents an outright reversal of the traditional values of hard work, exceptional ability, and individual achievement motivated by feelings of jealousy, the philosophy of equity, and a this-natural-born-comparative-inferior doctrine toward the ideal of competitiveness.

The Psychology of Envy and the “Tall Poppy”

To comprehend why people are attacking excellence, we have to first explore the psychological concept of envy. In many cultures, there is a social phenomenon called the “Tall Poppy Syndrome”, which describes a tendency for people to pull down successful, smart or ambitious people who stand out from the crowd. This is an example of what Friedrich Nietzsche labelled as ressentiment, an underlying feeling of jealousy which compels the masses to attempt to bring noble and great people down to their level.

Instead of looking up to high achievers and trying to achieve equally extraordinary things themselves, the average person finds it far more convenient to attempt to pull down those who excel. In the modern era, this form of psychological defence has been weaponized and turned into the foundation of many institutionalized policies. The modern response to the fact that high achievers create feelings of inadequacy in the less successful is not to encourage perseverance or to improve oneself, but to eliminate the very conditions that permitted the high achievers to attain their accolades.

Crazy, isn’t it?

The Equity Illusion and Flat Education

The impact of this on the educational system is significant, as evidenced by the fact that schools throughout the Western direction have deliberately dismantled all of their gifted and talented programs. The thinking behind this strategy is simple:

if all students cannot achieve excellence, then no student should achieve excellence.

Take the battles over gifted programs that have recently taken place in New York City, where numerous lawmakers have tried and failed numerous times over the past decade to stop gifted programs due to their perceived inequity. Consider the actions of the San Francisco Unified School District in 2014, when the district banned Algebra I from eighth graders in an effort to close the achievement gap along racial lines. This “equity experiment” backfired dramatically, leading to poor mathematical performance in the district, and resulted in the district being forced to revert to its original position on Algebra I ten years later.

The model used by the educational system in this situation is one where there is no competition. Children are given participation trophies instead of awards based on merit, incorrectly teaching them that the mere act of existing is as valuable as the accomplishments they achieve.

By removing competition from the lives of young people, they will not learn how to fail; they will not learn how to get back on their feet; and they will not learn how to seek out mastery. Instead, we are creating a generation of individuals who have been prepared for the competitive world in which they live and who will be unprepared for the challenges they will face as adults.

The Crisis of Grade Inflation

As expectations continue to be lowered for the lowest common denominator, success metrics become meaningless. Grade inflation in higher education is at a crisis level; at Harvard University alone, over 60% of grades received by undergraduates are “A”, and the average cumulative GPA is 3.83. In other words, when “A” is the default grade, it no longer represents excellence but is simply a validation of attendance.

Harvard Percentage of “A” Grades by Academic Year:

2005 - 24%

2024/2025 - >60%

This dramatic increase in grade inflation at elite institutions results from a culture of prioritizing emotional safety above the rigorous evaluation of student performance. Academic rigor is a collective action dilemma for these institutions as they fear either backlash from students or being accused of being inequitable, thus causing them to abandon or greatly reduce their standards of academic rigor.

The Expert Who Wasn’t

I recently witnessed a perfect example of this phenomenon.

A person I know approached me, proudly presenting themselves as an undisputed expert in their field - solely on the basis of being in the final stages of a Master’s degree and receiving high degrees. They then proceeded to lecture me by citing a single paper they had published more than a decade ago, as if it somehow proved their intellectual superiority over me. There was never any comparison to begin with.

On the other side stood “poor me”: a five-year Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, a five-year PhD in Artificial Intelligence, a two-year Master’s in Business Administration, more than ten scientific publications, research collaborations with Daimler-Benz and the Greek Police, and multiple scholarships awarded for being at the top of my class for three consecutive years. And this doesn’t even include my professional work experience and (significant) achievement. All of it achieved twenty years ago, when earning these credentials was significantly more demanding and rigorous than it is today.

This encounter perfectly illustrates how the modern education system, combined with unchecked ego, can completely sever someone’s connection to reality. It creates fragile, inflated self-perceptions built on minimal accomplishments while blinding people to genuine expertise and hard-won achievement.

Wokeism and the Institutionalization of Mediocrity

The term “Woke” is frequently used to describe the basis for this ideological shift in society; through a “Woke” lens, every disparity in an outcome is an indicator of the presence of systemic oppression (oppressors). The expression “Woke” places an emphasis on group (e.g. ethnic) identity, thus diminishing the significance of individual accomplishments. Although efforts to implement Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in the corporate world are generally promoted as equitable, they often involve lowering the bar for hiring and performance in order to satisfy demographic quotas.

When organizations give precedence to “lived experience” and identity over qualifications or merit, they create a culture in which mediocrity is endorsed by the culture at large. Indeed, Vivek Ramaswamy recently stated, “American culture has glorified mediocrity over excellence for too long”. Those who are vested in maintaining the culture of mediocrity are those who benefit from it, those who do not possess the ambition or ability to engage in a level playing field, and therefore rely on the rhetoric of social justice to gain unearned privilege.

Reclaiming the Pursuit of Greatness

Excellence doesn’t have to be dead due to the lack of opportunity. For any society to survive and thrive, that society must reject the toxic empathy that has been promoted by many in our current society as a means of levelling the outcome and promoting true equity. Equity means providing everyone with an equal opportunity for success while allowing everyone to pursue their own dreams and desires without being required to achieve a certain outcome.

It is important that we now return to a system of competition in our schools, openly and unapologetically celebrate those who perform better than others (exceptionalism), and acknowledge the historical significance of the traditional structures of merit and hierarchy (family structure/patriarchal responsibility) have been the engines that have driven human advancement.

By Dr Ioannis Syrigos

References

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McKay, B., & McKay, K. (2022). Envy, Ressentiment, and the Inversion of Values. The Art of Manliness. https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/behavior/envy-ressentiment-and-the-inversion-of-values/

Ending New York’s Gifted Programs Would Hurt Students. (2025). City Journal. https://www.city-journal.org/article/zohran-mamdani-gifted-talented-program-new-york-schools

San Francisco Reinstates 8th-Grade Algebra After ‘Equity’ Experiment Fails. (2026). Washington Free Beacon. https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/san-francisco-reinstates-8th-grade-algebra-after-equity-experiment-fails/

Participation Trophies along with Grade Inflation Are Hurting More Than Helping. (n.d.). The Sport Journal. https://thesportjournal.org/article/participation-trophies-along-with-grade-inflation-are-hurting-more-than-helping/

Harvard to Tackle Grade Inflation With Cap on A’s. (2026). Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/learning-assessment/2026/03/13/harvard-tackle-grade-inflation-cap

The True Cost of Grade Inflation at Harvard. (2026). Harvard Magazine. https://www.harvardmagazine.com/university-news/harvard-grade-inflation-faculty-marks

Addressing the Grade Inflation Collective Action Problem. (2025). U.S. Department of Education. http://www.ed.gov/about/homeroom-blog/addressing-grade-inflation-collective-action-problem

Trump’s War on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. (n.d.). Scholarly Commons. https://scholarlycommons.law.cwsl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1530&context=fs

Vivek Ramaswamy Says U.S. Values ‘Mediocrity Over Excellence’. (2024). HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vivek-ramaswamy-america-mediocrity-over-excellence-immigration_n_676daaafe4b0186e1db6cfb5