When Power Becomes Flexible: Why Elite Narratives Are Losing Credibility
The Weakening of Meritocratic Narratives: When Authority Loses Its Power to Persuade, and Institutional Communication Reaches Its Limits (Part I)
In Beyond Nationality and Success: Two Daughters, Two Relationships to Power, I noted a quiet shift in how people respond to success. It is not always visible at the level of headlines. It appears instead in tone—in hesitation, in irony, in a reluctance to admire too quickly.
Stories that would once have been received as aspirational are now met with distance. Not rejection, exactly. But something more reserved.
A question, held just beneath the surface: What made this possible?
For a long time, success was narrated through a relatively stable framework: talent, effort, discipline, opportunity. The system, whatever its imperfections, was assumed to be broadly coherent. Rules existed. Boundaries held. And while not everyone succeeded, success itself felt legible.
That coherence is beginning to fracture. Not because success has disappeared, but because the conditions surrounding it have become harder to trust. What appears fixed at the level of principle increasingly feels negotiable in practice.
Power, in other words, is experienced as flexible.
This flexibility rarely announces itself directly. It appears through exceptions—cases where procedures are adjusted, where ambiguity is tolerated, where outcomes align just a little too smoothly with broader interests.
Each instance, taken alone, can be explained. There are always reasons: context, complexity, consideration. But over time, a pattern becomes visible. Not one of explicit violation, but of selective elasticity. And it is this elasticity—not necessarily injustice in the strict sense—that begins to erode credibility.
Elite narratives do not depend on perfection. They depend on coherence. Not equality of outcome, but a belief that the same logic applies across cases. Once that belief weakens, success no longer reads as purely earned. It becomes entangled with questions of proximity: proximity to institutions, to influence, to systems capable of adjusting themselves.
This does not mean that those who succeed are undeserving. But it changes how their success is interpreted. Recognition becomes conditional. Admiration becomes cautious. And the distance between achievement and legitimacy begins to widen.
This shift is not confined to any single country or system. It appears, in different forms, across institutions—in business, in media, in sport, in diplomacy. Across domains, the same underlying tension emerges: a gap between what is stated
and what is perceived to be practiced.
This gap also exposes a deeper strain within institutional communication. Much of its traditional logic assumes that legitimacy flows outward from established authority. That alignment with institutions signals credibility. But as perceptions of power become more contingent, that flow becomes less reliable.
What once read as authority can begin to read as distance. Organizations whose language centers on people can appear increasingly removed from them—not necessarily in intention, but in reception.
The language remains stable. The interpretation shifts. And where alignment with power is emphasized—through partnerships, positioning, or narrative framing—it can create the impression that relevance is being maintained upward, rather than outward.
What erodes here is not formal authority, but something quieter: relatability.
Those who have worked inside large institutions will recognize this pattern. Authority is not only exercised; it is also absorbed. Over time, proximity to institutional structures shapes how reality is interpreted. Alignment begins to feel like validation. And what is internally experienced as coherence may be externally read as distance.
This tension becomes especially visible in how merit is described.
Within institutional narratives, success is often presented as the outcome of a merit-based process—structured, principled, internally coherent.
From the outside, it is not always read that way. What appears as merit within a system
may be interpreted, externally, as proximity to power—to networks, to access, to forms of recognition that are not equally available.
The distinction matters. Because once merit is perceived as contingent, it no longer stabilizes legitimacy in the same way.
This is not a new concern.
As Michael Sandel argues in The Tyranny of Merit, meritocratic narratives can produce their own form of disconnect—not only by rewarding success, but by shaping how both success and failure are morally interpreted.
When outcomes are attributed primarily to merit, structural conditions recede from view. And when those conditions are uneven, the narrative begins to strain.
In such an environment, communication that relies on institutional authority—or on the assumption of merit as self-evident—begins to lose resonance. Not because its principles are rejected, but because its underlying logic is no longer taken for granted.
What follows is not immediate collapse, but a gradual reconfiguration of trust. Admiration becomes provisional. Authority becomes contingent. Narratives that once relied on symbolic clarity—progress, merit, leadership—lose some of their persuasive force. Not because they are entirely false, but because they no longer feel complete.
In this environment, a different kind of value begins to emerge. Not smaller success, but success that appears less mediated. Less aligned with power. Less dependent on institutional adjustment. Less contingent on exception. In other words: success that feels more self-contained. More bounded. More legible. More real.
The question, then, is not whether power exists. It always has. The question is whether it remains legible—whether its operations can still be understood as consistent, or whether they appear increasingly contingent, adjustable, and selective.
When power becomes too flexible, it does not necessarily become weaker. But it becomes harder to believe in. And once belief shifts, so too does the meaning of success—and the authority of those who seek to define it.
This is not a crisis in the traditional sense. It is a change in perception. A recalibration of how legitimacy is granted. Quiet, uneven, and still unfolding. But already visible—
in the space between achievement and how we choose to receive it.