Blank Doll wakes up.

Reading the memoirs of le duc de st. simon has been most instructive, seeing that I have dreamt of Versailles for the past three nights. Yesterday's dream, involving the duke, me as some weird spy and some other woman buying back his property tops it all.

Anyway, in line with my horoscope's suggestion that I abandon old ideas and old ways of doing things, I have put my old sketchbook in the same place with all my tys and notes and have taken out a new sketchbook. It's like, the Cultural Revolution all over again though it's probably not as traumatic since the only violence I did to anyone was the act of ripping off the freaking shrink wrap on my new sketchbook. Like, who the hell shrink wraps sketch books? Hello, do you see a sell-by date on sketch books? Do sketch books have a sell-by date?

Victor accuses me of having a silly preoccupation with rank which in turn prompted me to analyze my preoccupation with it. It's not really silly, is it? We live in a world where the conference of rank through birth has largely been extirpated by the good efforts of the great unwashed who probably grew tired of how they could never pronounce the litany of names that such noble births entailed. But we have only replaced rank by birth with rank by merit. Yes my dear, rank by merit includes wealth as well. This is why the new heirarchy is just as self-perpetuating as the old though it certainly presents less of a half-baked justification along the lines of how since my great grandfather fought beside the King then, so I must be as good as my great grandfather. Now we have since my great grandfather was a sugar baron, then I am as good as he is because I have even more money than him.

The fact is, what is society without rank? We are individuals who are our worst make Hobbes' Leviathan look like a promenade through the park, whose unlimited desires confound the boundaries of sanity. It is unbridled power that rank serves to temper. Yes, rank confers power but it dictates to whom power goes to, how power may be used and the degree of power as exercised by each individual. Without rank, there is no order and power goes to he who has no compunction in the act of murder. The replacement of rank by birth with rank by merit has merely changed the criteria with which we determine the various rank of various people.

It is worthy of note here that in China and her past dependencies, rank by merit has been the norm for more centuries than it has been in Europe. The imperial examination apparatus, with which power was conferred, was never demolished by the barbarians who ruled China. While it is true that birth could make a man's life easier because offices of a lesser degree could be purchased, it was based on the fact that one's elders (presumably your father) had achieved his rank by his own merit in the examinations. In addition, while the birth into a wealthy family may help, it was not so much the fact that one belonged to the family that smoothed the path of one but the resources of the family that allowed one to move forward in Society.

Meritocracy breeds inequality just as well as other systems of power. To ignore this inequality on some misguided sense of social correctness undermines the incentives as well as the very objective of meritocracy.

C'est tout.