I need life to be fair! My need is so strong in this regard that I seek the rewards life owes me and avoid punishments that rob me of the fairness I deserve.
Fairness means meeting my needs
There are, of course, natural laws that regulate the interactions of the physical world and that so often seem unfair to me. Then there are my laws, based on need, against which I judge everything’s fairness. My laws say natural laws are unfair – and should be corrected accordingly! THEN life would be fair.
How can I get my needs met unless I act upon my world with the kind of unfairness nature uses? Fair is fair so unfair must be unfair and I must met it with unfairness. My ego believes I must upset the apple cart, so to speak, to get my needs met. I use equations of my own making to accomplish this task.
Fair = Satisfied need = Reward = Good
Unfair = Unmet Need = Punishment = Bad
Being the keeper of rightness, my ego sets itself up as nature’s correctional institution – teaching my conscious mind by doling out just enough rewards and punishments to engender belief and obedience to its “corrected” laws – fairness. When my conscious mind screams out, “It’s not fair!” my ego feels secure that I’m along for the judgmental ride.
Is reward and punishment nature’s way of demonstrating balance through cause and effect? What if nature’s unfair balancing acts are really acts of imbalance? True for my ego! In this regard, I may be acting very much like nature. If there’s any truth to the title “mother nature” then I feel fully vindicated!
Every system requires obedience to law to succeed as a system
Why does fairness seem to accompany the reward and punishment philosophy? Is reward to punishment what mercy is to justice, winner is to loser, gain is to loss, and good is to bad? How fair is it to separate out systems within systems?
When I feel a need to filter out the good from the bad in a system, such as one of my acquaintances from the others, I put a huge strain on multiple enmeshed systems in a congruent interactive operation. I may have initially envisioned a win-win situation in which I get my needs met. Yet isolating any system that has been successfully interacting with other systems changes the dynamic of multiple systems that affect me – from the micro to the macro – within the context of oneness – ME.
My judgment and action to correct another is always a judgment and action to correct myself. Applying my win-loss, good-bad, reward-punishment, fair-unfair filter to my perceptions merely sustains my belief in the fairness formula.
Judging some part (a system within other systems) as bad is a call for me to examine how I’m judging myself as bad. Might I address the law I’m following rather than the results of that law? In other words, if my intention is to meet my need to be a perfect mom and my child is showing me the energetic results of that need by acting out, can I see that I am the cause and the result of my perception of them as well?
How long can relationships, families, institutions, religions, races, cultures, and societies endure such need for division? My need!
Perhaps reward and punishment have the same dividing effect as fairness. Can there be true fairness in either perspective? Does winning or losing encourage connection other than to side with others who agree with me – acceptance?
How can those I reward or punish confirm anything to me than my sense of gain or loss? Can competition have anything other than a dividing effect with gain/loss as the goal? How about fairness?
