Let's talk about “fairness.”
Immediately, one might think, “life's not fair.” It's as cliché an aphorism as exists. I contend the person offering it is often clapping back in a defensive dismissive way towards someone who's put voice to a perceived injustice. A condescending parent might employ it to shut down their child. Notice, the truth of whether or not the situation is unjust doesn't factor in at this level. “Life's not fair” is something of knee-jerk reactionary “fuck you” to someone. I think it's a viscerally powerful and familiar reminder as well as short-hand for how we treat each other, and thus life broadly.
Why ever offer to say it? Simply, you feel life has been unfair to you. You feel like something isn't adding up or playing out like it should. You can consciously know that perhaps “existence” moreso than “life” isn't “fair.” It might be better to say existence is “ambivalent” more than “fair.” Who's trying to contend with existence in every response to yet another problem passing through their awareness? Hardly anyone, so here you go, life's not fair, existence doesn't care about you, and here I am to remind you while I practice reinforcing my insecure self on the back of your misery.
To talk about any coherent meaning in the word “fair,” you must have agency and accountability. It's anyone's guess where you'll get those, but they're prerequisites. If cookies are to be fairly distributed, you need to account for whom and how many, you need to decide on why, and upon review or reflection, the reasoning and actions should be a consistent and shared set of behaviors you can repeat in the future. If you have 3 kids, 3 cookies, all well-behaved and having eaten their dinner after which you promised they could have a cookie, you best get to passing them out. Both your and their sense of agency is mitigated by a deal and relationship with cookies at the nexus of your shared conception of the world. Thus, it's fair when you provide what's been accounted for.
You could state that another way. In a household where cookies are out of the question because of your views about sugar, the situation above is modified dramatically. Now, you don't get to talk about fairness without discussing a new deal. Do you have 3 cookies at all? Do you wish to reward finishing dinner? Superficially, watching from the outside, you may have an instinct about how or whether the parent should distribute the cookies. What kind of lunatic would make this more complicated than it needs to be? Surely, regardless of your ideas about sugar, one cookie isn't too much, right? Children have an uncomplicated relationship or feeling towards sweets, maybe you do too. Maybe the baggage of knowledge, access, and guilt of what sweets have done to you blurs what would be “fair” in this scenario considerably.
A more forgiving way of thinking about “life's not fair” would be to say there's an infinite amount of things you can't attend to, thus you can't make any real deal with anyone else about them. It's not up to you who gets the cookies or what the sugar content in them is. If you tried to play baseball without lines on the field, you couldn't blow up at the umpire for making his best guess about balls hit right down the line. That's the kind of game you're playing with life, yet I suspect you feel your capacity to call foul balls is on point. You think there are lines on the field, or at least those lines conveniently appear the moment you need them.
As someone who likes to claim his own agency, I'm constantly trying to suss out what I think is “fair.” It rarely coalesces until I'm able to either understand myself and what I wish to bring to the situation, or get a shared idea of what someone wants from me. If you don't want anything from me, I'm not gonna gripe about what is or isn't fair. If you want something abstract or communal or colloquially understood, I may reflexively clap back with one of my comments or jokes because it's unlikely I've made the same deal with that space as most others. Maybe I don't understand or respect your reasons you want me to behave or speak like other people. My agency feels under threat, and what I wish to bring is a provoking jab or invitation to communicate another way.
Think about asking someone at work, “How ya doing!?” “Okay, thanks!” There's an argument, a fair one to me, for those kind of interactions a dozen times a day for the sake of a manner of “professionalism.” I won't spin-off and reiterate all of my problems with the word “professional,” but you do want the business of the day to trump an impromptu therapy or bitching session. There's reason to play along if you've accepted the broader deal of that work environment, having subverted some agency by default.
But what happens if you don't have that agency, don't make any claims, deals, or hold any responsibility to share anything? What if you're blind to the asks you're making? What if you're allowing your agency to be as ambivalent as existence? Surely that's the default state. You aren't born “enlightened” or on your way to matter-of-factly accepting your death. There's no class you take parsing through the litany of formal and informal asks regarding the society or era of time you inhabit. You're conscripted into existence, whether or not you decide how to conceive of the war you're fighting, your role in it, or whether it's even a war, comes much later, if at all.
We ignore the many contextual layers we exist in at our peril. If you hear someone disagree with “systemic racism,” consider what context they're coming from. An immigrant fleeing Afghanistan might conceive of the oppression and force used to keep a minority in check vastly differently from a third generation minority student growing up in a white neighborhood. The nature of red-lining is different and not equal to the nature of slavery. That's not a controversial thing to say unless you have a kind of “one drop” psychology and language for how to talk about things. That is, while absolutely not enforced this way, one drop of Jewish blood could give the Nazis license to exterminate you. One act of oppression or contamination of the narrative becomes license to declare the most extreme aspects of the problem and prompt disproportionate action.
We have to return to the idea of what or whether you're going to bring anything to a situation. Most people stay silent about most things. Most people who speak up, tend to inflame the flame war. It's why there's an appeal for mediums in which time is taken to discuss things. Whatever you think of any given talk show or podcast, it's perhaps the only time in someone's day they aren't otherwise subjecting themselves to whatever the ambivalent forces of life are errantly dictating. I can attest to how impossible it is to focus on a good book or lecture when I'm occupied with work responsibilities. I know how the mood or feel has to be right in order for me to get engaged or think I'm capable of learning or remembering something.
What's fair in this new business I'm trying to start? The rate at which Medicaid pays? The things they are and aren't willing to cover? The time it takes them to review paperwork? That I cobbled together my circumstances, certifications, and relationships into something at all? Will it be fair to ask for 2% or 10% of the gross from anyone I invite to be a part of it? They are questions without enough context. They have no input from the person I'm asking to sign on. I have no access to the forces that turned our health care system into what it's become. I know what I want to bring to the table regardless. I know what I'd be able to accept were I to sign up with someone like me. I know that whether I'm getting paid $15 or $1500, my next steps are what's going to allow me into the room about what's “fair” given the constraints, intentions, and needs as far as we can discern them.
The task is to check your impulse for fatalistic “life's not fair” thinking, and continually ask yourself what it is you can bring, why you're doing so, and whether a deal can be worked out so that while you're subverting your agency for some rules, you haven't submitted altogether. This will ease the anxiety or inner-conflict about when to speak up at work or why. This will keep you from working yourself into a froth in comment threads. This will keep you from resenting your partner. Because it's so abstract and indirect, it's nearly impossible to convince someone that their intentions, as much as their actions, matter. It's even harder to get them to understand how much goes into informing an intention. “I didn't mean to hurt you!” You might insist. From experience, I can tell you, no one ever believes me when I say it. (see: discussing trans issues, religion, my sense of humor, lashing out, or basically anything I touch or speak to ever.)
Do I need you to believe me? Do I need you to treat me “fairly?” What's at stake? I know what kind of friend or thoughtful person I wish to be. Do you? I know what lane my style of boyfriend or business owner or antagonist sits in. I know when I want to set a bad example, reveling in my depraved feelings, exhausted in searching for a sense that I share anything with anyone or that I could ever be understood. I know the different mes, what provokes them, what inspires them, and how they help or hurt my ability to find my center. I have to work out what's fair for me and myself just as much as we have to figure out what will be fair between us.
That's why fascism, unfair. Occasional emotional outbursts, incorrect word choices, time to breathe, and as many mistakes as need be made in service to the shared direction and terms, can all be fair. That's why you stay in abusive relationships, constantly changing the deal in a one-sided way. Abuser and abusee can make the same error. Who's responsible for what remains infinitely obscure even before something definitive, perhaps violently, happens. We have laws and protective orders and normative notions that trick us into thinking it's easy to understand or how to respond when the worst of the drama unfolds. We have statistics on how often we return to the abuse. There's a reason I had to assess your situation and unpack your details and discuss with others before a decision was made to remove your children. When a person, let alone institution, engages in one-sided power mongering, disinterested in the discussion, or is instinctively reveling in flames of the drama stoking the coals of their pathological past...you can feel how far removed a discussion of what's “fair” is from that clusterfuck.
If I use my awareness of what's prompting me to speak and act, dictate a goal for doing so, and imagine that abstract roundabout way in which what I put out comes back, it tends to mitigate things. I maybe choose a less “harsh” word. I maybe find a little more patience to explain something. I maybe feel a little more at ease and like life isn't rushing away from me. It's a fun little game for me to pretend to be a newscaster under my Nazi senator's facebook page. When it's not a fun little game and I play it fast and loose with the rules, I start making comments that get me banned for 30 days. If I want to bemoan a loss of agency when they ban me while submitting to a totalitarian facebook system, without irony, I'm creating stress and a contradiction in my being.
So what are the rules of the different systems you're in? Is there a conscious agent on the other side reinforcing them? Does it matter if the rules are fair? Betraying your kids on a cookie deal seems like it could have drastic ongoing consequences from fomenting distrust to provoking disobedience or even threatening how the children conceive of themselves. How could a person who cares, who they rely on, do them so dirty?
I habitually flirt with the rules and lines. It's a flirtation, not a rejection. I may drive my trailer without extra brakes, lights, a license plate, or registration papers...a dozen times, but that is considerably more a testament to my relative poverty and priorities than it is a brazen disregard. In the larger contexts of my life, if I don't have health insurance, I'm sure as fuck not spending more at the BMV first. And until I get ticketed, this conditional “unfair” space I choose to operate in is just that, a choice to roll those dice given my anecdotal experience of Indiana's general ambivalence towards licensing trailers. I may not feel great about that ticket, if it comes, but I'd be foolish to rush home to bitch for 3 pages about how fucked up the cops are.
We need to share. We need to feel like we're choosing and making decisions, at some level, in whatever context we might exist. How does someone like me survive in a place like a State institution and endless contradictory rules and policy context? I choose to do the job, but I pimped out my desk area to facilitate my needs and efficiency. I don't have to add “fuck” to every sentence to speak to real people in real terms about what's going on. I advocated for myself to get the role of assessor verses permanency because I knew I'd kill something if I felt chained to the office environment. I wrote my emails arguing for what I thought was right or where people were fucking up, and I left when the context decided it was time to overwhelm the agency I was expressing, probably a little too late. The terms of the deal, if ever they were, changed, and I still live out the consequences of that betrayal.
If I have any say in how you conduct your life, don't be like the people that, I must assume unconsciously, drive me away from the good examples I'm setting. Don't let yourself feel threatened and insecure by not taking responsibility for the words you're choosing to keep yourself or others down. Do you say, “Life's not fair?” Do you reflexively go to, “It doesn't matter” or, “Who cares?” Can you tell the difference between the you who might try to be funny in the face of fascism and the you who is about to be banned? One is an ignorant, judgmental destroyer of worlds, and the other ruminates on what causing and observing the destruction is going to do to undermine their own being.
What kind of power do you have if superficially, if not often practically, it's none? You have the power to envision and work towards a broader grasp of what's “practical” or “professional.” You have the power to keep yourself aware of what it takes to even discuss “fair” in a way that makes sense. You have the power to learn about how best to describe yourself across domains and obligations and the power to define what needs to remain steady and protected within them. I don't lose my creativity or voice even working for the State. I don't lose the fight in me. I don't lose the ability to incorporate everything I learned and every relationship I made into the next thing. I'm not forgoing the opportunity to write about and explore my time there. Hopefully, in the most roundabout way, it contributes to a more deliberate, intentional, agency-driven environment broadly, and I don't have to reduce myself or what we're capable of to “hope.”
Fair enough?
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