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Caste systems, elite overproduction, assortative mating, and system stability. Everyone espouses the benefits of meritocratic systems, but few people recognize that they are inherently unstable. Overall welfare is increased as competition increases productivity.
However meritocracies come with a lifespan because they contradict part of human nature. That part being humans generally hate competition and want to pass on inherited status/wealth to their offspring.
By opening avenues of advancement to everyone, it also tends to result in elite overproduction as more capable people seek to take advantage of the opportunity. Yet in an society, there are only a given number of elite positions, so while the raw numbers of people striving for
them has massively increased, the greater portion will fail and fall by the wayside. The "winners", rather than waiting to be knocked off by the next round of arrivistes will always seek to entrench encumbent advantage (Humanity's first law of preservation of status).
The most primal method is careful mate selection, that is breeding winners with winners. One of the side effect of meritocracy is the hardening of social borders in order to preserve status and avoid the losers, what better way that not having kids with them.
The more fierce the competition for status becomes, the greater the consequences of failure, the greater the risk of elite defection. All of those thwarted elites created by the meritocratic system become the seeds for infighting, civil war, or revolution.
The beauty of the caste system is that it limits elite overproduction by squashing meritocracy. It has solved the civilization stability question by taking the assortative mating element and running with it until the social classes are so enodgamous and distinct, status so fixed
at birth, that avenues of advancement so limited that no one is capable of challenging the elites. No status competition means no revolutions. That said, caste systems are difficult to implement because obviously people are not going to volunteer themselves and their descendents
for perpetual helotry. The solution to this, as happened in ancient India is introducing the multicultural element. To prevent potential insurrection, you need to break the ability of the hoi polloi from cooperating with one another. India solved this through it's jati system
of smaller endogamous groups, each with their own particular socio-economic niche and their own particular status. By stratifying society into so many distinct bands, each more interested in struggling with those immediately above and below it, it becomes much more difficult
to challenge those at the very top. By introducing a foreigners into Western societies, Western elites have created the beginnings of their own jati. In addition, the growing obsession with creating ever more "minority" groups such as Homos, transgenders, etc.
can be viewed in this lights as attempts to further segregate society into smaller social conflicting niches to prevent mass revolt.
