Don't Be a Fair-Weather Friend

Many times have I been informed that some procedure at my workplace would not be changed in my favor because it "wouldn't be fair". Of course I was opposed to this at first just out of sheer self-centeredness, but as is my fashion I also thought deeply through the reasons behind my reaction, attempting to discover a motivation beyond mere selfishness, since I have good reason to suspect I'm usually not that shallow. And sure enough, what began as my sour grapes at being so denied has grown into a revelation about what I believe is necessary to create a better world.

According to Wikipedia, "The just-world fallacy refers to the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just. As a result, when they witness an otherwise inexplicable injustice, they will rationalize it by searching for things that the victim might have done to deserve it. This deflects their anxiety, and lets them continue to believe the world is a just place, but often at the expense of blaming victims for things that were not, objectively, their fault."

Anyone who has not long since learned that life isn't fair quite simply isn't paying attention. We live in a world where bad things happen to good people and vice versa at least as often as anything seemingly deserved happens, and yet we continue to cling to this screamingly nonsensical notion that life is just and fair. (Wishing it WAS just or fair is perfectly fine; it is only refusing to accept the obvious fact that it ISN'T that I have a problem with, and more especially insisting on setting policy on the basis of this delusion.)

Not only do I personally oppose the doctrine of fairness, but I outright declaim it as being responsible for a good fifth of all human misery. Since it takes resources we don't have to elevate all people to the utmost of happiness, any attempt to be fair can functionally consist only of spitefully dragging everyone down to the same level of misery. It is the absolute antithesis of what the world needs in order to grow beyond its failings. Any attempt to enforce fairness on the world can only consist of spreading the contagion of unhappiness like a man with ebola flinging gouts of his own infectious blood at everyone he can reach to make sure he doesn't die alone.

Stop accepting the inevitability of evil. Stop blaming the victims of life's fundamentally mean-spirited nature, no matter how much you may think they had it coming. Stop accepting that anyone who is in power deserves to be, that authority figures deserve your trust just because you've always trusted them before. We can solve these problems, but not until we stop pretending they'll solve themselves because everything works out in the end. It doesn't, it never has, and it never will. Luck is arbitrary, justice is imaginary, and things aren't going to take care of themselves. If we want the world to work in a fashion that we consider right, we have to make that happen, not claim it's already happening. And until that transformation is completed, cosmos-wide and right down to the most fundamental law of physics, so that all problems generate their own solutions and everything balances out in a fashion that pleases us, until then we will continue to be trapped in a galaxy-wide quagmire of injustice that only gets more dangerous when we fail to acknowledge its presence. (You'll find that very few things do otherwise, come to think of it.)

LIFE ISN'T FAIR. Accept it, and start thinking about better ways of dealing with that fact. Otherwise, you're part of the problem. Nothing could be more unfair than imposing your personal, biased definition of fairness on someone else. Ditch the entire concept from your vocabulary and start trying to do what's RIGHT, not simply what's equitable. That is the only way life will ever improve.