> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://longtalkshort.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# The Test That Sorted You Was Built on a Belief: Jiang Xueqin's Case Against the Meritocracy, Checked
- URL: https://longtalkshort.com/jiang-xueqin-occult-of-the-meritocracy-test-built-on-a-belief/
- Published: 2026-10-31T16:39:02.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-31T16:39:02.000Z
- Description: If a test score ever sorted you, Jiang Xueqin says the system behind it is failing children, and that it grew from a quasi-religious faith in reason. We check his history of the SAT, IQ and the word meritocracy, and look at the school he'd build instead.
- Author: Truman
- Tags: Psychology, Jiang Xueqin

**If a test score ever decided which school you got into, you were sorted by a system most people call fair: the best and brightest rise, go to the best universities, and then run things.**

Jiang Xueqin, the Canadian educator behind the Predictive History channel, told viewers in Hong Kong that this system, the meritocracy, is failing children. His bigger, far more contested claim is that **it was never only about fairness.** In his telling, it grew out of a religious project: a belief that reason could perfect the world.

*In short: Jiang says the meritocracy rewards a narrow kind of mind, produces specialists instead of thinkers and has turned childhood into an arms race. He traces it to an "occult" belief in reason as a divine spark, carried by Freemasonry into the SAT and on into AI. His alternative is a school built on nature, religion and the great books. The critique is easier to defend than the origin story.*

## 1\. Three complaints about the system

Jiang calls himself a product of the system: he went to Yale on a full scholarship. Yet he says he wouldn't want his three children to go there, for three reasons.

- **It isn't fair.** Standardised tests favour children with high IQs and good memories and discard everyone else, he says, though emotional intelligence matters more in life.
- **It is narrow.** Elite graduates chase a tight definition of success; few become public intellectuals.
- **It escalates.** When he applied in 1995, Yale admitted about one in five applicants; for the class of 2029 it was closer to one in twenty. So parents build résumés from kindergarten up. Students he met at McGill, he says, described burnout.

It wasn't always this way, he argues. The United States once had **three kinds of university:** the Ivy League as a rich man's social club, research universities such as Chicago and Johns Hopkins for scholars, and A&M colleges for farmers and engineers. Nordic countries, he adds, invest in vocational training, because most people want a good job and a family.

So why did a few private universities and one test come to dominate?

## 2\. His hidden story: a faith in reason

Jiang offers what he calls the occult or eschatological explanation: **a belief about how history ends.**

Medieval Europe, he says, taught that the world was fallen and that life was penance and obedience. Repression bred rebellion, the Reformation and a new idea: that people could build paradise on earth. He ties this to Kabbalah, which in his summary holds that God made the world to know itself, human ego broke it, and we must repair it. In Freemasonry, as he tells it, reason is the divine spark, and if reason triumphs the world is perfected. His conclusion:

> Reason is the meritocracy.

**His mechanism:** Harvard's president in the 1930s, James Conant, wanted scholarships for the best and brightest, and Henry Chauncey brought in the SAT, later running the Educational Testing Service. Both descend from pilgrims, Jiang says, and "we can suspect" they were Freemasons, because a temple needs perfect cubes, and IQ, which he calls "completely made up," was the way to cut them. When the result was a more unequal society, he argues, believers blamed family and culture, not the project.

The next step, in his view, is a switch of tools **from schools to AI.** He points to Meta's personal agent, Muse, and imagines people trusting an AI as if it were God.

![A chain of five linked cards, left to right: a fallen world where life is penance; reason as a divine spark that can repair it; a filter of tests and IQ that sorts people by reason; paradise, a perfected society; and, now, AI as the new tool. A note underneath marks the chain as Jiang Xueqin's argument, not established history.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d7/93/d793216c-cf13-441f-bdae-4f3aef998c0e/content/images/2026/10/fig1-65.png)

Jiang's origin story for the meritocracy, as we summarise it. His argument, not established history. Concept diagram of the lecture, not data. Made for Long Talk Short.

So what would he build instead?

## 3\. What he would teach instead

Jiang rejects three beliefs about children:

- **They are not blank slates.**
- **They are not mini-versions of their parents,** sent to succeed at the tennis the parent failed at.
- **"Critical thinking" as taught is mere reduction and categorising.** Creativity, he argues, is synthesis, closer to channelling.

Children, in his view, arrive with a purpose and judge character well, before adults learn to put up with bad bosses and relatives. He also says they choose their parents and remember past lives, **statements of his faith, not findings.** His message to parents: trust your bond with your child over experts.

His school rests on three things:

- **Nature,** ideally a self-sufficient farm community.
- **The occult,** largely meaning comparative religion, from Kabbalah to Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist and Shinto traditions.
- **The great books,** such as the Bible, Dante, Homer, Shakespeare and Milton, which he calls

> a portal into the mind of God

![Two panels. Left, the meritocracy as Jiang describes it: a funnel that filters children by test scores, sending a few to elite universities and discarding the rest. Right, his alternative school: three pillars labelled nature, comparative religion and the great books, standing on a base labelled each child's purpose and the parent-child bond.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d7/93/d793216c-cf13-441f-bdae-4f3aef998c0e/content/images/2026/10/fig2-53.png)

The meritocracy as a filter versus Jiang's proposed school. Our layout of his ideas. Concept diagram of the lecture, not data. Made for Long Talk Short.

## Weighing it: what holds up

**Holds up:** Yale admitted 20.0% of applicants for the class of 1999 and 4.59% for the class of 2029\. In Finland, 68% of upper-secondary students were in vocational programmes in 2021, against an OECD average of 44%; we didn't check other Nordic countries. Meta launched Muse in September 2026.

**Disputed: the SAT story slips.** Chauncey picked the SAT for Harvard's scholarships in 1934, but Carl Brigham, a Princeton psychologist and eugenics supporter, created it in 1926\. Chauncey became ETS's first president in 1948, with Conant chairing its board. ETS is a non-profit, not a company, and the MCAT belongs to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Chauncey did descend from Puritans. **We found no evidence that either man was a Freemason, and Jiang offers none.** Treat that link, and the Kabbalah-to-SAT chain, as his speculation.

**Overstated: IQ is half right.** Alfred Binet's 1905 test was built to spot children needing extra help, and he rejected the idea of fixed intelligence. The quotient came from William Stern in 1912, and Lewis Terman's 1916 Stanford-Binet popularised it as a ranking. That fits Jiang's threshold-turned-standard story. "Completely made up" goes much further.

**Left out:** merit by exam is far older than Freemasonry. China's imperial examinations ran from the early 600s to 1905, and Parliament cited China when Britain's 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan Report proposed civil-service exams. And "meritocracy" began as a warning: Michael Young popularised it in his 1958 satire *The Rise of the Meritocracy* (the word first appeared in 1956), and later said he was "sadly disappointed" it became an ideal.

**Not checked:** what IQ scores predict, or his claim that Galileo and Einstein rejected the scientific method. We worked from a machine transcript with gaps, and left aside most of the long Q&A.

**Bottom line:** the arms-race critique is grounded; the Masonic origin story is his view, without evidence.

**Related reading:** for Jiang's earlier argument that self-control grows from a stable childhood, see [The Marshmallow Test Was Never About Willpower](https://longtalkshort.com/jiang-xueqin-marshmallow-test-trust-not-willpower/); for one school's very different attempt to rebuild the day, see [Inside Alpha's AI School Day](https://longtalkshort.com/alpha-school-two-hour-school-day-joe-liemandt/).

## Long Talk Short

- Jiang says the meritocracy filters for one kind of mind and turns childhood into a résumé race.
- His origin story, a faith in reason carried by Freemasons into the SAT and on to AI, is speculation without evidence for the Masonic link.
- History he skips supports his critique: exam merit is centuries old, and "meritocracy" began as satire.
- His school rests on nature, comparative religion and the great books, around each child's purpose and the parent-child bond.

**The one thing to remember:** a test can tell you who is good at the test. Before you let it define a child, ask what it leaves out.

Source: ["Global Meet-Up #8 (Hong Kong): The Occult of the Meritocracy"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xwJFjWcFow&ref=longtalkshort.com), a lecture by Jiang Xueqin on Predictive History (YouTube). This is an independent summary of that lecture and is not affiliated with the channel.

*This article is for general information only and is not educational, parenting or professional advice.*