Life Is Not Fair
The value of fairness has a lot to answer for.
More than a value, in fact.
The psychologist Jonathan Haidt identifies fairness as one of the six moral foundations that all humans have, across cultures, political differences and more. How that fairness shows up and how important it is for each of us can differ, but its presence can spike things in us.
Of course it can. According to Haidt's work, it seems to be one of the six most important areas of morality for each and every human. And partly, it is genetically coded. Like many aspects of our psychology, the moral foundations might be described not as hardwired, but as pre-wired. There is some initial genetic predisposition, then affected and moulded by the many years of our life experience.
And at the foundation of that pre-wiring, is - among other things - fairness.
Few things pull me out of my normal centred self like perceived injustice against me.
My sister once observed that few things frightened her more than being incorrectly found guilty of a crime.
The fury of the Twitter activist, railing against what they see as injustice with ever increasing fury and vitriol, is a sight to behold.
The quest for equality - itself a form of fairness - is among the biggest political conversations of the last century and more.
And yet, as my dad would often say, with his mother's voice in his ears, life is not fair.
She knew that better than most. The romantic and snappy story of meeting her husband (my grandfather) at a dance in East Yorkshire melded into the tragedy and trauma of his life-threatening accident, paralysis and eventual death, leaving her and two young sons behind.
Life is not fair.
And yet it should be.
That's what our moral foundations teach us. Evolved to be pre-wired that way, presumably, to give humans the competitive advantage of cooperation.
It took me a long time to see that fairness comes in different flavours. Equality is one (and even that can have many applications and interpretations). Proportionality is another: do we get what our contribution deserves?
I only have to slow down in the middle of an email exchange with a supplier to see my sense of injustice triggered. In fact, I didn't need to slow down, I could feel it in my chest.
For those of you who haven't read Haidt's work (or indeed Daniel Kahneman, or many other behavioural psychologists), what happens after our intuitions are triggered is that our rational brain explains them.
But deep down, what we are looking for is something intuitive. Intuitions, as Haidt says, come first.
Can we step beyond the pull of the intuitive response? Absolutely.
Is it easy? Absolutely not.
So often the trigger of one of the intuitive parts of us (in Haidt's work, the moral foundations relate to Care/Harm, Loyalty/Betrayal, Sanctity/Degradation, Fairness/Cheating, Authority/Subversion and Liberty/Oppression) leads us into conflict with others, leaving us trapped in 'I was right and you were wrong'.
The slowing of this and then the stepping above it, into a higher part of ourselves, is a skill that can be practiced, however. We can choose.
We can see that deep down, we are mostly looking for approval, control or security; that one of those things (or more) may feel threatened. But that in reality, we have what we need.
And staying cool in the face of the conflict is more likely to make more of life fair than to be pulled into the heat of the moral foundation and its intuitive response.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
Read the archive of the 12-minute blog here.
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