THAT'S NOT FAIR!

"A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both." - Milton Friedman

In present culture, a great deal of worth is placed upon equality and, more importantly to this writing, the application of authority in order to create equality. It is often raised up as chief of our cultural values, its needs trumping all others such as freedom, peace, prosperity or even reason. Any suggestion that an action taken in favor of equality might be wrong is met with unthinking moral outrage; for if equality is a greater aim than reason any argument taken against such an action, even the argument that it will not, in fact, result in equality, becomes an argument against not only the "greater good" but against all that is good itself.

Usually this clamor for equality comes not with the solution being to lift one person up but rather to bring another down. If you have ten and I have four, it is held, then authority should force you to give of your excess to me until we are equal. If one objects, no matter how sound the reason, then one is declared the villain: you have spoken against the Mighty Equality and must be in favor of greed and bigotry.

It is never allowed that, perhaps, the demanded equality might not be such a grand ideal. Equality is never allowed to be held up under scrutiny and asked "is this really what we want?"

The root of this goes back to childhood upbringing and the culture of the home. Anyone with siblings can likely attest to having used (or attempted to use) those seemingly magical words which must surely result in manifesting our desires: "THAT'S NOT FAIR!" as if simply deciding that our being thwarted being unfair made it so, and that it were somehow the duty of the authority we addressed to rectify the situation by applying their authority to make life fair. Even those without siblings learned to apply this (for lack of a better word) reasoning thanks to the forced pseudo-sibling relations of our schoolmates and pseudo-parent teachers. Later, as parents ourselves, we heard this refrain from our children and found ourselves being pressured to, like our parents and teachers before us, apply our authority to make life fair.

Far too often we, like our parents and teachers before us, never stopping to question whether what was being demanded were in fact fair. We did not question the rightness of "fair", a failing shared with our own parents and teachers. We could only, in our exasperation, deny culpability and say "life isn't fair!"

How many of us heard that line growing up? We heard it over and over and, trying to rectify this bit of wisdom with other life lessons these same authorities tried to teach us on being independent, contributing our part and becoming an adult ourselves. Over time "fairness" found a more specific goal in "equality". Yet we never learned to question that goal nor to understand that it lay in no authority's hands to grant.

The only fairness anyone, even the authorities, can possibly grant us is that of equal treatment. Anything beyond that demands that we insist on others receiving a treatment unequal to our own. We cannot take from our neighbor to make us equal in result without treating us unequally: one must be taken from that to the other may be given.

So we must learn to question the equality demanded and not say "life isn't fair!" but rather "your desire is what is unfair!"