3% – The Cult of Meritocracy and Imagining Otherwise

“You deserve it.” 

Imagine your whole life depends on just one test. A single exam that determines whether you’ll live to old age; have safe, spacious housing, healthy, colorful food and access to public beaches and forests. You can only take it once, when you turn twenty. If you pass, you’ll be part of the 3%, living on the Offshore, an island of unimaginable beauty. If you fail, you remain on the Inland, an over-crowded city constantly affected by heatwaves and street violence, with precarious access to food and buildings constantly collapsing. 

This is the premise of the Brazilian sci-fi, dystopian tv series “3%”, which, from the very first season, packs a punch against meritocracy, pulling you into a thrilling universe with complex characters. My purpose, with this essay, is to untangle my own thoughts on the politics of 3%. I will be exploring how it confronts meritocracy, how it depicts revolutionary power and how it imagines alternatives. Do read only if you already watched it as spoilers abound – if not, put it on your to watch list right now. 

In 3%, the cutting line of division is class, and there seem to be no ‘gray’ zones: you’re either part of the three percent, or one of the ninety-seven. Yet belonging is defined along lines of (various kinds of) ability: grit, quick reasoning, passing scores on IQ-like tests, knowing how to ‘read’ and manipulate others, when to be a team-player and when to fend for yourself. Race, gender and sexuality play little to no roles, as superiority/inferiority isn’t divided according to these categorizations. The science fiction world building cuts ‘clean’ into one thing: class, as sustained by a narrative of ability and thus, merit. 

You are (not) what you can do – (dis)ability and merit as social construction

The first season presents us with “The Process”, the name of the exam 20 year olds have to take. Amongst the main characters we meet Fernando, who, as a wheelchair user, is unsure if the “Offshore” will let him pass. The season-long answer comes, ultimately, holding that disabled people can make it to the 3%, if they are able to withstand the pressure and performance required – indeed, if they do possess some abilities. Fernando’s disability story arc surprised me (as a non-disabled person who reads disability theory) in its understanding of disability not as a ‘blight’ one wishes to get rid of, but as both socially constructed and part of one’s identity. Indeed, when Fernando’s desire ‘to heal’ is brought up as a drive for him to keep advancing, as the Offshore ‘might cure him’, he responds in anger: healing isn’t his main goal at all. His disability is presented as part of him, not his central characteristic, not his main drive, but nonetheless a part of who he is. Ultimately, even “disability” as we understand it in our society does not draw the line in 3%: the only line is the Process. Interestingly, this only underscores in bright colors how much of disability is a social construction: if Fernando passes, he becomes en-abled, the Offshore offering him access to all of public and private life. If he doesn’t pass, it is supposedly not because of his wheelchair use, but his incapacity to withstand the mysterious, challenging rules of the Process. It is a pity Fernando was played by a non-disabled actor. Besides the injustice of this, I am sure the depth of the character – who acts as a moral compass a bit too much – would have benefitted. 

The first season, with master manipulator Ezequiel and his doubts about his own deservingness, builds up to show us meritocracy is a lie – a cunning, deep lie, made to re-affirm those in power to everyone, including themselves. Why can they decide over the lives of others? Because they “worked” to be where they are. They deserve it.  

Your morality is only as good as your context – but you can change your context 

The second season reveals the origin story of the Offshore, whose Founding Couple was actually a Founding Trio. I chuckled when I found out, to be honest. The traditional heterosexual couple, the perfect, capable, rational founders of the rich island for the deserving few were actually… a polyamorous queer triad. At the beginning. A century ago, before the Process, when the Offshore was new, a crisis hit the Inland, making it necessary to evacuate immediately and deliver ‘too many’ people for the island to withstand. To halt immigration, the Trio discussed sabotaging the Inlanders. Two of them were in favor, one was not – such action would spell death for many, and would set the inlanders years back technologically. Psychologically, this is explained as follows: the one who is against the sabotage comes from privilege, the other two have lived in the streets and know what it’s like. They refuse to act in deep solidarity, choosing themselves over others, which is explained as something they learned ‘in the streets’.

3% often constitutes morality as contextually grounded, questioning its relevance in a fight for survival. Its characters take different paths, some choosing forms of ‘egoistic-altruism’ (Glória), others sticking to one clear goal and trying to accomplish it by all means (Michele). In conditions of precarity there is never an easy guess of what the moral thing to do is – but Joana, one of the show’s strongest, most charismatic and mysterious characters, shows us that you do have a choice, and even more than that, you can change your situation. In this season she becomes part of The Cause, a chaotic, partially anarchist organization that seeks to destroy the Process. Enlisting Fernando and Rafael’s help, they come very close to achieving that. In another season, it is Joana that says something along the lines of: everyone is altruistic on a full stomach. By showing us how characters such as Michele, Elisa, Glória and Marco change their allegiance according to their contexts and possibilities, 3% not only gives us an engulfing story, but presents the ways in which people are defined not only by their psychology, but by their social surroundings – and the ways in which they can change them.

You can’t have anarchy without anarchists – practicing prefigurative politics

Third season brings us to The Shell, a superbly designed alternative to the Offshore, situated in the desert and run by Michele. Because I didn’t do it before, I need to say the set and costume design for the entire series is amazing – on one side, we have the clean, sports/corporate-like clothing of the Process, in a restricted, faded color palette and the huge, modernistic white buildings of the Offshore on a background of the bright blue sea and fresh greenery. On the other, we have the rag-tag, scrappy yet colorful clothing of the Inland, slapped against gray-yellowish buildings in ruins, browns and burnt oranges without a hint of lushness. Finally, The Shell, an organic-like structure functioning like a solarpunk utopia, where everything is recycled and which has a dash of brightness and ‘earthiness’, using braided ropes to create patterned clothing and hammocks as beds. 

“Everyone is welcome” is the sign that sits atop The Shell’s entrance, marking its philosophy against categorization, meritocracy, and all that The Process stands for. The Shell is presented as an egalitarian, democratic society where (almost) everyone contributes what they can in the many routine reproductive labors: tending to plants, cooking and cleaning, repair work. This doesn’t last long, though, as a sandstorm destroys its water-collecting system, leaving them in a difficult situation. Suddenly, their resources aren’t enough “for everyone”. What to do? Michele receives an offer for help from the Offshore, but she denies and hides it from people, considering it unacceptable. With this non-democratic decision, a trail of events begins. 

Giving in to the pressure and to Glória’s advice, Michele starts organizing a Selection. A Process by a different name, the selection will “weed” out certain people, keeping who is worthy of staying – until The Shell can be rebuilt and everyone can come back again, or so Michele keeps saying. The quickness with which people bend to the Selection is mind-blowing – and these are people who were critical of The Process, at least partially. They go with it, because “it is what they know”. We’ve been shown many scenes with Fernando’s father, a preacher, speaking for the Founding Couple, repeating the creed in the Process and the superiority of those who are deserving, but it is only now that we are proven how deep this belief goes. It is the first thing to run to when trouble arises. Resolving a problem with the tools you already know – the master’s tools. Neither the people, nor Michele, truly know how to organize themselves differently. Michele tries to implement a “fair” selection, and in the process (haha) she realizes it is impossible. At the end, even her speech says so to the Selected: this was not fair, do not think you are better than anyone for being here. Which not only rings empty, but angers them. Because they do think they are better. The tests proved them so. 

The belief that you are ‘better’ than another because you think faster, act smarter, realize things sooner is proven false again and again. When Joana, angry at the people’s readiness to embrace the Offshore’s help, scoffs in superiority, Natália (her friend/romantic interest) tells her she is just like Michele. You think the people are stupid? She asks (or something similar – all quotes are from memory). They just do what they know to survive. We can only unlearn together, Natália seems to say. 

This season tells a great story about what it takes to change a society and its peoples: everything. Not a leader, not a different place, not a different narrative. Everything has to be otherwise, again and again: the material condition must permit it, but the people, too, must be able to imagine it, feel it, think it, organize it. One without the other isn’t enough, and it will fail. And yet – a seed can be planted. The Shell is an experiment in doing otherwise. A flawed one, but an attempt nonetheless. It’s learning the practice of general assemblies, of collective discussions and decision-making that ends up allowing, at the very end, a hopeful beginning. 

The revolution won’t be pretty – but it can be hopeful, eventually

The final season takes all of the character’s arcs into a bundle to be finally untangled, especially Marcos, who, as an Alvares, should have passed the Process, but did not. Throughout the seasons, he goes from being a ‘good boy’ to an especially evil incarnation of entitled masculinity (from our society it is impossible not to read his behavior as violent white masculinity, but in the show’s logic, it is his ‘bloodright’ that provokes his entitlement, not his gender/racialization). Marcos is later pictured as a disabled survivor, taken to the lowest of humiliations and brought up again, ending with a redemption arc. He incorporates one idea of deservingness – the one rooted in blood, which not even the Offshore’s dystopian fertility policies could break. He should have been “the elite of the elite”, as his mother and grandfather before him. But he failed – why? Largely, because he took it for granted. His entitlement made him unable to react properly. It is only later, when he starts to challenge his family inheritance, that he develops as a person in his own right. He is part and parcel of every major action in the last seasons, from the developments in the Shell to the final sabotaging of the Offshore. 

This season’s main antagonist and Michele’s brother, André, never struck me as a properly well-made character, so I will skip over his reign of terror. One scene that remains with me is the drunk chit-chat, seemingly innocent, between Cássia (a former agent of the Process who had killed members of the Cause) and Rafael (a Cause member and the Offshore’s most spurned person-of-interest, an ex-spy). Failing to mount a good plan to sabotage the island, Rafael finds himself drinking alone in the Offshore, until Cássia joins him. After all this time, they talk as if the dividing lines between them have fallen, ignoring that one could have killed the other had the situation been different. This is the sort of situation that can only work in a long running series, where so much time has elapsed that it becomes believable, for the characters and viewers both. The two end up in bed together and, when he wakes up, Rafael takes her ring (an accessory that would allow him to enter anywhere). But she catches him, of course she does. Here is the painful moment which I was afraid will define the whole series: Cássia lowers her gun. She tells Rafael to take the ring. With sadness in her eyes, she says she admires his belief in change. But she doesn’t have it anymore. Whatever you’ll do, it will be the same, she tells him, so take it. 

A lot of action happens between that moment and the finale, including a prefiguration of consensus decision-making. The Offshore is destroyed – even more than the rebels would have wanted. In the end, when everyone gets to be “in the same boat” – not everyone is, really. Some people still hold power, in the sense of command over resources, over guns and other people. And it is a test, precisely a device of the past, that stirs things forward. As if to say – the past will haunt you. It is, undoubtedly, here. But beyond it, you can try to build something else. You can try – at least. As they enter the Process building to hold the first General Assembly with everyone, they smile – they seem to think it is worth it.

***

I’d have to write a chapter-wide essay at least to touch upon all the issues I found interesting in 3%. I spent no words on Marcela (Marco’s mother), a fascinating character built as an unscrupulous military machine who is also capable of spinning words and manipulating people towards her goals. I didn’t explore Michele as a naive leader, a determined but morally ambiguous character, capable of anything to achieve her goals. Nor did I write enough about Rafael, who goes from aloof to incredibly dedicated, from alcoholic to revolutionary, and who, through it all, seems to be one of the most loyal to an egalitarian ideal. Nothing about Elisa, whose inherent ‘goodness’ is politically challenged when she has to pick a side. And I didn’t talk about The Cause and its founder, Tânia, about the weight of revolutionary leaders, the rebellions they help stir and those they nip in the bud. Hell, there’s a lot I didn’t talk about, because 3% covers so much interesting ground to dig up. You do it!

Weeks after finishing the last season, my head was still ringing with the dystopia’s motto in Brazilian portuguese: “tu merece”.