@pandascepter
Well, it's true
@immortalartisan
The conclusion I've come to with monogamy/polygamy is that generally society should consider monogamy the norm for stability reasons, but it should not discriminate or look down upon people who choose polygamy in which all parties consent.
The reason for this is because naturally women will typically all go to well-established and high-performing men if given the opportunity because of differences in evolutionary psychology and the fact women seek stability in relationships due to the fact they have much more investment both physically and mentally in ensuring that their children are well supported and given good access to resources, and so will look for mates who are good picks. Generally, this means older, more established men with greater resources will be more attractive to women, whereas younger men will seem unattractive by comparison. In nature, this problem sorted itself out because men tended to die more through riskier actions which could yield bigger rewards but were more likely to result in death like hunting or warfare, which meant there were less men around. However, because there were more women around who tended to raise their young and work on agriculture, it meant more women would go to certain men, meaning more men who were older with more resources, and thus had survived more and were more reliable, were able to reproduce more often.
The issue with polygamy in the modern era is that it would lead to more of a demand for women than there is a supply as most of the women would go to a select few men, and leave a lot of men not satisfied emotionally or mentally, which history has shown to lead to disastrous consequences due to the extremes men are willing to go to in order to seek those satisfactions, so people generally settled on monogamy when men started to die less often the gender balance became more 1 to 1. Therefore, it means that more men would be more content because it means they would get the emotional satisfaction and women would get the security they were both looking for generally, though monogamy has many issues due to how people change over time and the issues of investing in one person being a potential risk in certain scenarios.
The reason why I would want polyamory to be socially accepted but not the norm is due to the fact that I believe individuals should be free to choose whomever they wish to be in a relationship with if everyone involved consents, and that the government does not have the right to deny a person that ability. The issue is that we meet equilibrium broadly if the median is one man gets with one woman, (with the exclusion of gays and lesbians due to them canceling one another out due to their populations being roughly equal) so that the dating market doesn't get tilted, though if oneside has surplus, it should generally go to be in a relationship with the side with the deficit.
It's an economic/biological thing.
As for meritocracy, obvious a perfect meritocracy will never exist where people are based solely on competence, but if we can get as close to one as feasibly possible, that would be ideal, due to the fact human diversity allows for people to specialize in multiple areas leading to different systems that people can rise to various ranks in based on skill and competence, meaning there won't be competition solely in one area of human success, such as what happens under Communism and Fascism where the only way to gain prestige or power is through government. Ideally, you want to minimize the factors of luck, birth, inherited wealth, nepotism, etc. as much as possible, even if it's impossible to completely remove, whilst maximizing positions based on skill and ability. It's never going to be flawless due to human power always tending towards corruption, but if you can put systems in place to minimize that corruption such as ensuring competition in the market and putting selection pressures on certain aspects of society to be more efficient, you can down play its effects over time. Unfortunately, we haven't done that as effectively as we should have...