Abstract

Starting from the Michal Sandel's 2020 book "The Tyranny of Merit", in this essay we will study the resentment of white American workers without college degrees towards political, economic and social elites and its relationship to the phenomenon of disinformation and conspiracy theories, specifically the one known as QAnon. We will first explore Sandel's book and its relationship with paranoia and then we will expose the keys to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which will serve to compare the similarities between its causes and logics with Sandel's reflections on the consequences of meritocracy.