What Changed my Mind on Meritocracy

I highly doubt that reading this essay will have the same impact that I felt when I was writing it, but I came to reject meritocracy during an essay for AP English Lang. The prompt as to argue whether or not America was a meritocracy. I think me writing and seeing my argument against meritocracy in paragraph 2 really cemented in me how unfeasible my previous system of binary free-will and egalitarianism was. Welp, here it is:

The American Dream for many is an integral part of their American identity. However, the American Dream is just that, a dream, for America is not a meritocracy due to logistical issues with a meritocracy, American entrepreneurial culture, and the inequality in America.
A great flaw in meritocracy is in what defines merit. Suppose we wish for people who work hard to achieve greatness. While this seems like it would be greatly accessible to everyone, allowing for a meritocracy, how exactly does one work harder? There are only a limited number of hours in a day and limited ability to even use it all. In addition, suppose we measure this “meritocracy” using capital. Thus we claim that billionaires such as Jeff Bezos work over 1000 times harder than millionaires. This is physically impossible given the number of hours in a day. One may retort that they deserve merit for their intelligence and ingenuity. But then how does one simply be intelligent or ingenious? There is no method or thing one can change about themselves to suddenly come up with a great idea. The principal goal of a meritocracy is to allow anyone to rise to success and the fact that ideas aren’t under our control suggest that it is impossible for “anyone” to succeed. Consider my experience with Physics C. I am pretty good at Physics C, and whenever people ask me what I do or how to get better, I simply have nothing to say. It truly seems to me like I simply see a problem and then magically see a path to the solution. Magic is not an “innate trait” and thus there is no merit in my skill. Since this flaw is inherent, it is thus impossible for America to be a meritocracy.
America also has an entrepreneurial culture that is unmeritocratic. For many the quote “fake it til you make it” is a statement they live by. However this quote says that one only needs the skill of deception in order to achieve success. This means that even having skills that one merited can simply be superseded in success by one who is good at deception. I recall a Shark Tank episode in which successful entrepreneurs were presented businesses by new entrepreneurs, and one of the successful entrepreneurs told the presenter to commit themself fully to their business. This suggests that hard work and immersement in one thing could provide the ideas and growth of a successful business. However, what happens if one doesn’t get ideas? Due to the American culture surrounding entrepreneurship, many believe that failure is solely one’s fault. Thus there is no/little safety net for those who fail. As shown earlier, ideas are not something one can control. Thus business leaders can immerse themself into a subject, fail, and then be in debt for the rest of one’s life. The failure to have good ideas wasn’t in their control and yet they are harmed greatly for it. I have had experience with full commitment to one subject and not having any great ideas through my experience at a math summer camp. During this camp I immersed myself in math, doing math almost every waking moment. Yet not that I reflect on my time there, I see no ideas that were very remarkable. Should this experience happen in the real world with severe consequences like lifelong debt, this advice to immerse can’t be the basis of a meritocracy. Yet this idea is pervasive in American culture. America also has a culture that holds human connection to be a big role in success, especially in business. However this makes no sense in the view of a meritocracy. Having human connections doesn't transfer any more skill or hard work (dare I say merit once more) to the connected. Yet America cherishes human connections as requirements for success. These connections are doubly bad through social inequality.
America also has inequality that is very unmeritocratic. There is a great divide between those with money and those without money in this country. Consider credit. For those whose parents have bad credit, it is harder for one to obtain a credit card to build one’s own credit. This discrimination based on parents has no basis on one’s own talent. It takes no skill to be born to rich or poor parents. Being born to rich parents also confers a vast network of people that is not only unmeritocratic in the transferring of this network, the very existence of its advantage antithetical to meritocracy. Also consider race relations. America has a very bad history with racism, as evident by the Civil War and the history of Jim Crow laws and segregation. These limit many people’s potential for no real reason. One may argue that those are issues of the past. However, there is still a wage gap between blacks and whites, and there even was a study recently showing that fake resumes designed as if they were white received more employment attention than those designed as if they were black, even with equal job skill. These differences obviously had no basis in their inner talent nor hard work and could severely limit people’s achievements. Also consider the health system. There are many who are born with pressing medical issues that should left untreated, permanently reduce one’s abilities. However, the current health system is very expensive, doubly so for those without insurance. This thus restricts the ability of poorer people to achieve success with their abilities. The core premise of a meritocracy is that everyone has equal ability/opportunity to achieve success. Yet the widespread inequality reveals America’s nature of unmeritocracy.
The failure of meritocracies and meritocracy in America suggest that we need to think harder and longer about what we want our ideal society to be like and how it will be carried out.

I hope we don't get a prompt this deep on the actual AP test. I can't imagine having like an existential crisis in the middle of the AP test lol.