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Why is it that people won't accept that life simply isn't fair?

Usually nobody disagree when you say that life isn't fair, but then they go ahead and pretend that it is. They will even go so as far as to invent religious concepts like karma do explain how this supposed "cosmic balance/scoring system" can work.



It's just modern day religious conceptualization.

In the past, people hoped in "God" to handle the very obviously unfair world they could observe around them every day. The idea that "you'll get yours in the end, and it will be grand" is the basis of pretty much every religion on the planet.

Recently, the modern western world has fallen away from religion; a drive through the American Bible Belt notwithstanding. The problem is that people have not been able to adjust to the concept of living in a world that is not only unjust, but without purpose. It's a very difficult concept to reconcile with and maintain a sense of sanity - but this is what religion had been providing to us all these years.

Accepting life isn't fair by default means that you must accept that you have very, very little control of things. Humans hate not being in control; we're programed that way.


Yup. Cognitive science people even have a fancy word for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

Justice is something we have to bring to the world, its not anything we should ever expect to find there naturally.


Life is perfectly fair. I don't understand why people must try to think different.

A great nurse who gets cancer. OK, so either she caused it with life style or something genetic bought it on. Why is that not fair. She was either always going to or, she caused it.

I really don't get this "fair" business at all.




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