In an otherwise insightful piece, this stands out as such spectacularly naive optimism that it alone could lead you and others down a path that would be far worse than continuing the status quo.

Not because the statement is wrong. Because of what you use it as an answer to. Why do systematic flaws or personal biases exist?

I hate to break it to you, but you know, I don't think the problems that Confucius wrote about in the 6th Century BCE about systematic flaws and personal biases, for which he recommended meritocracy as a solution, had anything to do with how the U.S. was founded.

The problem is far, far, far deeper than mindsets and behaviors consciously and unconsciously ingrained and reinforced. That's part of the problem. But people are also just like that by default. You see it all throughout history, from China to Greece to the Mayans to ancient Egypt.

If you treat the problem as a fundamental aspect of human psychology which manifests itself in cultural norms borne of oppression, but will come up anywhere and everywhere else it's given a chance, you have to take a very different approach than if you think you've isolated the sole enemy and can fight the virtuous fight of good guys against bad guys and defeat gate-keeping once and for all.

Shifting around who is the ingroup and who is the outgroup, who we favor and who we gatekeep out, is pretty easy on the scale of generations. Jews? Outgroup, bad. No, wait, Nazis bad outgroup, Jews ingroup, good! Oh, actually, never mind, Jews are part of the oppressor class, outgroup, bad.

Building a culture where these natural instincts aren't triggered, in contrast, is hard. There's always a temptation for backsliding. But if it can be done, that's where the real progress comes from, so we don't at best shuffle around whose potential we waste and whose we champion beyond any reason.

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I think you also have the relationship between capitalism and meritocracy backwards. Capitalism loves merit. Capitalism is fundamentally a description of a process that naturally maximizes marginal value, and nothing delivers marginal value better than merit. Capitalism loves gatekeeping as a way to get maximal return on investment, but what gets through the gate is merit (or merit per dollar of salary). Not enough merit? You can starve, for all Capitalism cares.

But Capitalism also brings with itself an abundance and concentration of resources. The power wielded by those humans who have enough resources--oh, those flawed biased humans again--enables them to use some of the surplus to avoid taking advantage of the merit of people they disfavor, for whatever reason. Now they can gatekeep on other traits, like race or religion, making themselves happy at the expense of maximizing marginal value in the Capitalism sense.

The problem with lack of meritocracy isn't Capitalism. It's that you can't bring enough Capitalism to bear to overwhelm human bias. By the time you turn the dials to "only marginal value production matters, you can all die for all I care" and you must be extremely meritocratic to compete as a group, your gatekeeping will be tightly honed on ability and what potential you can develop, and you will also have a bunch of dead or at least homeless people who got gatekept out of life and/or society. This is pretty awful.

However, this doesn't mean that having more robust social support will make things better for merit. Indeed, it gives the breathing room to make things worse. So you have to counteract it with an extra-large helping of culture, if we're going to do the merit thing.

One might then conclude that merit is more trouble than it's worth.

But if we're not going to lean pretty hard into merit, whoever "we" are, we have to be aware that "they" might choose merit more robustly and thereby outcompete "us". So even if we have robust social support, it's probably critical to get the culture of merit right, or it won't be many generations until we're so outcompeted that we may not have the surplus resources to devote to robust social support.