“It's Not Fair”

How often have we heard the words “But it’s not fair”. We hear it from children who are denied a treat. We hear it from adults when they fail in a venture due to reasons beyond their control. We hear it from everyone who works with the poor, the disadvantaged and the sick in developing countries. Yet few people stop to analyze what these words really mean or imply.

The fact is that if by "fair" you mean everyone having the same odds for achieving success, then life has never been anywhere close to being fair, anywhere or at any time. It has not been fair even within the same family. For example, among children born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, the firstborns on average have higher IQs than their brothers and sisters, and usually achieve more in life. And despite all the sound and fury generated in controversies over whether different groups have different genetic potential, even if they all have identical genetic potential, the outcomes can still differ. There is no question that the accident of birth is a huge factor in the fate of people.

But Nature's own discrimination completely dwarfs man's discrimination. Geography alone makes equal chances virtually impossible. The geographic advantages of Western Europe over Eastern Europe – in climate and navigable waterways, among other things – have led to centuries of differences in income levels that were greater than income differences between blacks and whites in America today. A child born in sub Saharan Africa certainly has a completely different life prospect than one born in modern day Canada.

But many people fail to see the fundamental difference between saying that a particular thing – whether a mental test or an institution – is conveying a difference that already exists or is creating a difference that would not exist otherwise. Creating a difference that would not exist otherwise is discrimination, and something can and should be done about that.

But, in recent times, virtually any disparity in outcomes is almost automatically blamed on discrimination, despite the incredible range of other reasons for disparities between individuals and groups. The really serious question is what can be done to reduce disparities without creating other, and often worse, problems. Providing free public education, scholarships to colleges and other opportunities for achievement are fine as far as they go, but there should be no illusion that they can undo all the differences in priorities, attitudes and efforts among different individuals and groups.

Most of us want to be fair, in the sense of treating everyone equally. We want laws to be applied the same to everyone. We want educational, economic or other criteria for rewards to be the same as well. But redistribution of material resources has a very poor track record when it comes to actually helping those who are lagging, whether in education, in the economy or elsewhere. What they need are the attitudes, priorities and behavior which produce the outcomes desired.

A more hands-on concept of fairness gives third parties a much bigger role to play. But whether any human being has ever had the omniscience to determine and undo the many differences among people born into different families and cultures – with different priorities, attitudes and behavior – is a very big question. Trying to change whole cultures and subcultures in which different individuals are raised would be a staggering task. But changing anyone's attitudes, priorities and behavior is a lot harder than taking a stance as defenders of the oppressed and crusaders against the forces of evil. To the extent that doing the latter misdiagnoses the problem, it makes solving the problem even harder. That does no good for those who are lagging, however much it exalts those who pose as their defenders.
Whatever the innate capacity of any race, class or other group, what pays off in the real world are developed capabilities, and these have never been the same – or even close to being the same – for individuals or groups. Unfortunately fairness as equal treatment does not produce fairness as equal outcomes. The confusion between the two meanings of the same word has created enormous mischief, much of it at the expense of lagging groups, who have been distracted from the things that would enable them to catch up. And whole societies have been kept in a turmoil pursing a will o' the wisp in the name of "fairness."

But where did the attitude, “It's not fair” come from? For some reason we live with an expectation that life is supposed to be fair. Therefore, when we encounter a situation that appears not to be going the way we believe it should be going, we believe that its outcome is not fair. Children and adults appear to have similar definitions for what is not fair. These seem to be issues related to personal relationships, the equity of assigning responsibilities and expectations, and the distribution of gifts.

It appears that this attitude almost always arises whenever someone perceives or feels threatened that someone else may be getting something that she or he believes should be her or his. The perceived right to consider that something should go to me instead of another leads to the attitude that something is not fair when it does not go the way I desire. When this attitude is perceived, perhaps a consideration of one's selfishness scale should be considered.

Why do we believe things are not fair? This attitude seems to have developed from our first interactions with others and our observations of other people's activities and lives. These attitudes can be developed from watching television and seeing how other peoples' lives are lived – although fictitious. Often in TV Land and Movie Land we see personal encounters always work out and it appears that the main characters lives work out fairly. In many of the stories children are read, the stories end with happy endings. Perhaps these expectations of happy endings lead us to believe that our life incidents should all have happy endings. When our real-world lives do not always end with happy endings, then we may believe things are not fair.

Can we really change the attitude of “It's not fair”? Perhaps taking time to reflect on the fact that no one ever stated or proved that life was to be fair might help us to change our attitude. Also, if we develop an attitude of gratefulness for what we have and are not always looking at what other people have, we may stop evaluating our lives by what might be fair and be thankful for what we have. Perhaps by forming a more positive attitude towards our personal lives and the world around us we will be more satisfied with our lives and will not be so quick to look at another person's life and compare it with ours. By finding satisfaction in our own lives we might find that judging whether something is fair or not is no longer important. Finding fairness in life might be found in doing something to help one another.

"Life is unfair," John Kennedy observed at a press conference one day in 1962. The thought had a certain stoic grace about it. Bill Gates amplified it further when he said “Life is not fair: get used to it.”