Believing that life is fair might make you a terrible person

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No doubt about that. It is de facto evidence that life is not fair - some people work themselves into an early grave and never know peace, while at the other end some people are born into luxury and never have to work a day in their lives.

The question then becomes, "How to create artificial fairness?"

Do we seize all the wealth of the "One-Percenters" and disperse it equally among all the people of the world? I did the math once, and came up with an amount for each person that would not feed a family of four for more than a day in most third-world countries.

People are great at saying things like "Something should be done", but what plan is actually viable, and how to implement it in a world that is resistant to changes in the status quo?

In the world ? Quite a few people. In this thread ? No one thus far.

Calm down Fnord, I wasn't directing that statement at you or even at the poster I quoted. I just think that far too many people refuse to even acknowledge that inequality can hold others back.

While mental or physical inequality can be severe enough to hold some people back, it is also likely that others hold themselves back because they believe that being unequal means being unable.

Besides, we're not discussing equality and inequality so much as we are discussing fairness - equality and fairness are not the same thing.

I agree with this assertion. Terrible might be too exaggerated of a word to use. But perhaps "not spiritually grounded" would be a better word.

I have a number of reasons for believing this but I'd rather not share them.

That is the question I'd love an answer to...I am still in the 'well what is really wrong with the system' phase, still trying to work that out as that needs to be done before I could even begin to think of ways to improve it or ideas of how to implement it......even so I remain unhappy with the status quo.

Life is not fair. But to some extent, that's just an accident of nature.
You can't help being born with a disadvantage, any more than you can help being born with an advantage.

As for being a terrible person, we all judge those outside our own circumstances. The rich judge the poor for not trying hard enough. The poor judge the rich for being uncaring. The ugly judge the handsome for getting by on their looks and the handsome judge the ugly for being ugly. The fit judge the overweight for being lazy and the overweight judge the fit for being gym junkies.

Life is not fair.
People are terrible.
Don't worry.. be happy. -whistles

And using "inequity" (often blown out of proportion) as an excuse to be a slacker doesnt say very much that's flattering, either.

So I'm doing the world a favor when I tell my screaming child that "Life ain't fair. Fair is a place you go to eat cotton candy and step in horse poop."

Who knew????

Life isn't fair. People do all the right things-- people do more than what is necessary-- and still get the short end of the stick. Good men give their lives to their children and die alone and rot in their beds, while asshats who bullied their kids and sought to control them die surrounded by prettily weeping family.

"Belief that life is fair" might make you a horrible person because then you feel no obligation to try to even the scales, no duty to help. That weeping woman with the three little kids clustered around her-- she earned the position she's in. If she would have kept her legs shut, she wouldn't be here now. Therefore, I have no obligation to comfort her, no obligation to bring her a gallon of milk and a case of eggs, no obligation to brew a pot of coffee and help her find her way. That's the size of the attitude we keep butting up against-- you got what you deserved, so I don't have to take a single step out of my way to help you. Now quit cryin'. You're killing my buzz.

What can we do about it??

In the big picture, nothing at all. We cannot end War. We cannot end Hunger. We cannot end Genocide.

In the small picture, we can do everything. We can try to make the world around us a little more fair by doing something that we don't have to do for the benefit of someone we don't have to help. We can look out, in small ways if our means (or our hopes) are very small, for something more than Number One. We can put something else first.

LIFE AIN'T FAIR. That does not preclude us from trying to treat others fairly.

How can anyone believe the world is fair when there are dying, starving homeless people right here in our own country?? Or do they think such people are entirely at fault for such things?

Or how in the States anyone can go and buy a real gun at a corner store, but a kid supposedly uses his fingers as an imaginary pistol and he gets suspended?

Or that measles is on the rise mainly because of the stupid anti-vaccs, but I might get it even though I was vaccinated as a kid because most vaccines don't last forever and I could get meningitis and die from it l but if I tell people my point of view they'll accuse me of being a sheep and that the tin-foil hat wearers are right most of the time?

Innocent people are getting abused and murdered, animals are going extinct, the climate has gone to war and stepped on every proverbial landmine on the way and in a few more years I'll probably be forced to subsist on insects or be too violently sick from radiation poisoning to do so. The world is more unfair than ever!

Specifically WHO is saying that life is fair?

Name names.

I remember reading that some of the Founding Fathers favored something like an estate tax on the rich to prevent wealth from accumulating in a few families and essentially creating the same kind of aristocracy that the Founding Fathers fought to break away from.

Are you claiming that conservatives think that life is fair?

I know of noone who think that and I live in one of the most conservative areas of the US.

On the contrary, I think that they realize that life in usually unfair, but think that it is the individuals job to make out of it what they can.

In other words, "Of course life isn't fair -- deal with it".

That is true. But, the idea was tied to their belief that, aside from the slightly higher prices of raw or manufactured goods because of interstate excise taxes, there would be no federal income tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_St ... history%29 . They believed that a person could be taxed for tangible assets, not income. Apart from times of war, there were no federal income taxes until the early 20th century and, even then, only about 10 percent of the population paid between one and five percent (!) in income taxes until the 1950s.

If somebody told me I couldn't give my estate to my family tax-free, but I would be able to keep almost 100 percent of all my paychecks, I would hug them. I could easily rebuild whatever value my estate would have had from my parents (even including their properties and buildings) if between one-third and two-thirds of my ordinary income wasn't "withheld" from me as an income tax (not to mention property taxes, sales taxes and all the other taxes levied against me).

Unfortunately, since the 1950s, the "progressive" income-tax rates for most Americans has become a "lose-lose" scheme where I am punished for any inherited assets and for any ordinary income I try to earn.

And that is the mentality that seems to be causing some major problems in this society...there can't be any real sort of community unless people work together rather than against each other as they are encouraged to do here, even at an early age. The only way to effectively 'deal with' life not being fair in a society is to try and form a society which things are as fair as possible, but of course not to the point of stagnation. Something a lot on the right seem to be oblivious to...

It is not possible to make life fair. Nothing we can do will ever change that no matter how much effort and money we throw at it.

The best that any of us can do is to learn how to make do with what we have instead of wasting our lives in self pity and being envious of those who have it better.

I daresay that if we try to hard to make life fair, the most likely result is that we just make everyone far worse off, including among those for whom life is the least fair.

I did specify a society should attempt to make things as fair as possible within the society, of course there is no way to make life over-all completely fair, that is impossible.

Your second point is easy to say if you actually have your needs met and beyond, not so much if you have no food, no shelter and no money to attain such things...for a lot of people its not practical to 'be happy with what they have' when they are struggling to even keep up on basic needs.

Of course it is best to use what you have to the best of your ability and make do where you can...but I do not see how that implies there should be no regulations and/or programs in place to help disadvantaged segments of the population, or that there isn't a huge problem with wealth inequality that needs addressing. Adressing that issue as well as continuing to keep the social safety network in place are ways to make things more 'fair'. Fairness taken to an extreme would likely be everyone looks the same, has same abilities, same strengths, same weaknesses and I would say that is certainly too far....But no need to go too far to the opposite extreme and have a total psuedo-survival of the fittest based on economic wealth and political influence(via wealth) either, which seems like some people would like to move in the direction of.