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No one said it was a "feel good" story. The other person is using sarcasm to cope. Something very common and also shown in other comments of this story.

If you don't like it, don't respond. No one is forcing you to provide an opinion on everything. Be less of a dick.

It's as if you hadn't read the comment you're answering.

I'm not denigrating anything. I'm saying that "scientific communism" is not science, even if it officially is called that. It's like doctors of theology teaching you how to build a society. And any "scientific approach to governing" will lead to such a substitution, because people really holding power will invent that to keep it in fact.

And I see that you completely ignored the part about metrics used as KPIs always being gamed, thus hierarchical meritocracy plainly not being possible.

has proven to be incompatible with democracy over time and detrimental to any social contract

I've got gangbanged with downvotes recently for reminding that capitalism is literally the first "formation", if we play by Marx, in relative modernity (antique Mediterranean was a whole different thing, but it relied upon good climatic conditions, good connectivity allowing Egypt to feed the whole of it, common ethnically and religiously pluralist cultural space, and slavery), to offer horizontal mobility of the kind we consider normal, and vertical mobility to a bigger extent than before.

The person I was answering to thought that in a medieval town before capitalism you could just make a thing and sell it. In fact to make a shoe you had to be a shoemaker (by inheritance or by apprenticeship if the master had no children or decided to disinherit them, or by guild if in a bigger town), and if you weren't, making a shoe even for yourself was considered stealing from the shoemakers.

It's funny how, say, Robin Hood stories show it as it was, and those are supposed to be known enough, but people have such misconceptions.

Or even Tolkien's Shire - look closely how Hobbits' life looks.

A person would literally grow as a non-uniform piece of a non-uniform fabric of the medieval society, they couldn't significantly change their place whether they were a peasant or a prince. Being born a son of a carpenter, you wouldn't become cook. If you were the oldest son, you were expected to take on their trade and role of the carpenter in this particular place or part of the city, or to work for the oldest son. You were judged by the surrounding people if you didn't. If you were the younger son, it was a bit more normal to seek apprenticeship of some other specialty, maybe. So the cookshop's master could take you as an apprentice, if all his sons would go rogue and not take on his trade, or maybe not, but then even after ending your apprenticeship you'd work for the cook, not be the cook in that cookshop. You couldn't just open your own cookshop without like everyone approving it. It was a rare event. People in a medieval town wouldn't understand why they need a third carpenter if there are two carpenters and it always was so. Or why they need a second cookshop if the existing one was always here. It required significant changes - the town's role growing and it needing to accommodate newcomers, or a neighboring town being razed, thus the balance changing.

So - the purpose of this text was to explain that capitalism has achieved quite a lot. And when you are making a change, it's not a win-win game, you can both gain something you didn't have and lose something you had.

Anyway. All this is bullshit. The only ideological virtue humans can have is being able to, quoting Kipling, "... watch the things you gave your life to, broken, and stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools". That's because our kind is absolutely incapable of seeing and valuing what we already have and separating dreams of what we don't from the reality of what we'll get trying to achieve that. Everything comes to ruin.

So the only good trait of a clearly political ideology would be wide participation and rotation, so that as many people as possible were contributors of a political system. A cook can govern a state (as Lenin said), it's just important that it's not one cook, but many cooks, and that none of them keeps a position of power long enough to start thinking they know something, and that none of them can take a position of power predictably.

As you might have noticed, this is the opposite of any meritocracy with "wise elders" deciding who deserves to be assigned to a post and role and who doesn't.