Breaking the Loop: When 'Merit' Masks Power
The lived dynamics of exclusion in spaces that call themselves transformative.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the word merit—
How it’s used.
How it’s misused.
And how often it becomes a tool to gatekeep, deflect, and reinforce power structures in spaces that claim to be about growth, complexity, or spiritual transformation.
This isn’t just an intellectual problem. Or a spiritual one.
It’s a social one.
It shows up in any space where power is present and unexamined—where identity, hierarchy, and hidden bias shape what’s seen, what’s uplifted, and what’s dismissed.
I was part of a group focused on metamodern spirituality.
A space that, in theory, should have welcomed depth, nuance, and emergence.
In practice, it was dominated—like many others—by “brilliant” white men.
Most women and marginalized folks didn’t stay long.
Those who did often stayed quiet.
Not because they lacked insight, but because they already knew what would happen if they spoke.
I stayed. I contributed. I created a living theory of change rooted in personal and collective experience.
It’s called Exclusionary Feedback Synpraxis (EFS).
EFS names a recurring pattern that plays out in any social space where someone with less power offers feedback, insight, or creative work that challenges the assumptions of those with more. Rather than being met with curiosity or dialogue, the response is often dismissal, deflection, or discrediting—usually wrapped in intellectual neutrality or spiritual detachment.
It’s not just about disagreement.
It’s about who gets to define the terms of engagement.
Who gets to say what has merit.
And then it happened—clearly, publicly.
There had been a rupture in the group.
Tensions were rising. Trust was fraying. People were beginning to name what didn’t feel right.
In response, the leader—this white man with significant influence—asked the group what could be done better. He invited suggestions for how the space might evolve, heal, or grow.
A Black member of the group responded in good faith.
He recommended that the leader engage with two pieces of work that directly spoke to the issues at hand:
The Black Metamodern Manifesto, a vital contribution that centers race, history, and structural critique.
My work, Exclusionary Feedback Synpraxis, a living theory of change born from lived experience within metamodern, spiritual, institutional, and systemic spaces..
This was not about ego or self-promotion.
This was about accountability.
About offering tools for reflection.
About bridging the gap between stated values and actual behavior.
And the leader’s response?
He said he “mostly disagreed” with the Black Metamodern Manifesto and “personally didn’t care for it”—though he made sure to point out that he had published it and hosted a podcast about it, as if that insulated him from critique.
He said he “fundamentally disagreed” with the framing of EFS, and worried that engaging with it would lead to a “vicious cycle” where any disagreement could be read as exclusion.
And then, he said this:
“I don’t think successful group dynamics demand that people engage with things simply to make others feel good, or because they represent certain identities. That’s a kind of patronizing tokenization I find demeaning. Engagement should be based on organic interest and perceived merit, not manufactured or contrived.”
Let’s sit with that.
He framed the recommendation to engage with two marginalized thinkers’ work as tokenism—as if any invitation to stretch beyond familiar frames was “patronizing,” “manufactured,” or lacking in integrity.
He re-centered himself as the neutral arbiter of value—deciding what is “organic,” what has “merit,” and what is worth engaging.
But this wasn’t discernment.
This was gatekeeping in polished language.
This was Exclusionary Feedback Synpraxis in action.
And the irony?
He didn’t need to read EFS.
He was inside it.
He wasn’t analyzing the theory—he was enacting it, in real time.
That’s how EFS lives.
Not as abstract concept.
But as a repeating social pattern—a loop—
where power avoids reflection by dismissing the very tools that would expose it.
And that’s why this moment matters.
Because I’m no longer playing inside the loop.
I’m naming it.
And in doing so, I’m stepping out of it.
Let’s talk about merit.
Merit is not neutral.
Merit is not objective.
Merit is shaped by history, culture, power, and proximity to dominance.
When someone says, “This lacks merit,” what they often mean is:
“This doesn’t conform to my lens.”
“This challenges my comfort.”
“This comes from a body or a voice I don’t instinctively trust.”
Merit, in this context, becomes a wall.
It becomes a reason to exclude without appearing exclusive.
It becomes the justification for why marginalized brilliance remains unseen.
But here’s the thing:
I’m not here to be measured by someone else’s framework.
I’m not here to contort myself to be considered “organic” by a system that’s always been inorganic to me.
I created Exclusionary Feedback Synpraxis because I was living it.
Because so many of us are.
We are asked to explain our pain in ways that don’t threaten anyone.
We are asked to teach while being ignored.
To contribute without being credited.
To stay, even when the space doesn’t see us.
And I’m done.
This piece is my refusal.
It is my clarity.
It is my knowing that the loop breaks when we name it.
Exclusionary Feedback Synpraxis is real.
It’s not a proposal. It’s a mirror.
And I’m no longer asking people to look into it.
I’m holding it up anyway.
If you’ve ever been dismissed, not because your work lacked merit, but because it disrupted the comfort of those in power—this is for you.
If your voice has ever been called “too much,” “too intense,” or “too identity-based”—this is for you.
If you’ve ever watched someone pretend to be objective while protecting their unexamined bias—this is for you.
We are not outside the conversation.
We are the next iteration of it.
And we're not waiting for permission to speak anymore.
I am done protecting power so I can belong.
For too long, like so many of us, I’ve tried to belong by making myself more palatable. By softening the edges. By explaining things in a way that wouldn’t activate defensiveness in people with more power.
But that belonging is conditional.
That belonging is brittle.
That belonging asks for silence in exchange for proximity.
And I’m done.
I’m done protecting fragile egos so that I might be seen as reasonable.
I’m done shrinking my truth to be allowed in.
I’m done playing nice inside spaces that were never built to hold me fully.
This is my line in the sand.
This is my wholeness, without apology.
This is my voice, uncurated.
This is my merit—not because someone powerful said so, but because I know the depth it comes from.
If you’re walking this edge too—torn between being accepted and being real—know this:
You don’t have to make yourself small to belong.
You don’t have to protect power to find your people.
You don’t have to be digestible to be true.
We are not outside the conversation.
We are the next iteration of it.
And we are building something better.
Together.
Sher, with respect: your post presents a postmodern critique of the fb administrator’s statement on merit, framing it as a mask for harm and exclusion. But in doing so, you bypass a far more likely and meaningful interpretation: that the administrator acted in good faith, out of a sincere belief that tokenism diminishes rather than empowers individuals. By assuming his appeal to merit was a covert exercise in maintaining privilege, you adopt a cynicism that forecloses on the possibility of ethical nuance. What could have been a constructive engagement with competing values is instead reduced to a moral indictment.
The discomfort expressed with “tokenism” does not necessarily signal a resistance to diversity. But it can just as easily reflect a concern that representation should arise from genuine engagement, not symbolic inclusion. To treat such a view as suspect by default is to fall into the trap of reading all institutional actors through a singular lens of power and bias. But that move lacks interpretive generosity. You take a complex ethical stance and collapse it into a familiar narrative, one that leaves no space for honest disagreement or sincere principle. In doing so, you deny the humanity of the very people you aim to hold accountable.
Your analysis reflects a postmodern worldview: one rooted in suspicion, identity politics, and deconstruction. While this perspective has revealed many important truths, it also comes with limitations. It too often substitutes moral certainty for dialogical engagement and favors symbolic justice over substantive solutions. In contrast, metamodernism, as theorists like Hanzi Freinacht and Vermeulen suggest, offers a framework that holds tension rather than resolves it prematurely. It oscillates between sincerity and irony, idealism and skepticism, to find a middle path that affirms complexity. That kind of thinking is what your piece is missing.
The administrator you criticized was navigating a value conflict, not performing an act of harm. A metamodern response would have embraced the tension: how do we respect merit while honoring the need for inclusion? How do we ensure representation without reducing individuals to representatives? These are difficult questions, and they deserve more than an accusatory reading. The world needs conversations that can hold these contradictions, not ones that resolve them by villainizing people who disagree.
Rather than opening a generative dialogue, your article retrenches the postmodern habit of casting disagreement as evidence of moral failure. But not every challenge to a DEI initiative is rooted in bigotry, and not every call for merit is a tool of suppression. Sometimes, it’s a principled objection to shallow representation. Metamodern discourse recognizes this and tries to move beyond the binary of oppressor and oppressed. It seeks integration, not indictment.
Frankly, it’s disappointing that you didn’t take the opportunity to model that kind of depth and intellectual charity. Your critique, grounded in an outdated framework, flattens complexity into accusation. In an era that urgently needs bridge-building, synthesis, and moral humility, we can’t afford that. Postmodern diatribes have had their moment. It’s time to move on. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thank you for this. I need to remind myself that I can challenge these structures and must push back or leave if needed.