Meritocracy was originally a dystopian term, coined in the book "Rise of the Meritocracy" which:

"describes a dystopian society in a future United Kingdom in which intelligence and merit have become the central tenet of society, replacing previous divisions of social class and creating a society stratified between a merited power-holding elite and a disenfranchised underclass of the less merited."[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy