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The word "fair" has been tossed about much like the words equality, justice, and recompense. This 5-minute video reflects my opinions on the word "fair".
Agree? Disagree? Agree to disagree? What is fair to you?
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PamelaSteele 7 Jan 14
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1

There are two things I have been trying to arrive at in my previous posts. The first is how the experience of fairness effects quality of life. The second is that satisfying our instincts is only indirectly linked to quality of life.

Perhaps the best example of how satisfying instincts does not necessarily causally improve quality of life is what I call the Romeo and Juliet syndrome. Love as it turns out is suicidal. Like salmon swimming upstream to spawn and die humans seem driven to mate even when doing so is not in their individual best interest. This phenomenon goes beyond just the obvious such as venereal diseases, potential violent jealousy, risks of childbirth, resource strain and other existential concerns. There is evidence that just having children does not necessarily increase "happiness". The happiest people seem to be those with extensive networks of friends and non committed, childless, sexual fulfillment. Of course these people are extroverts who tend to be low in conscientiousness and are lucky enough to have the looks and social skills necessary to maintain social status. What I previously described as personality types that lean towards individual selection.

One of the question that is raised is when does quality of life conflict with or in this case fairness interfere with the long term survival of the culture or civilization. How does individual selection interfere with group fitness. Despite being very controversial common sense tells us that fairness is most likely dysgenic in a "civilized" environment. These are questions no one wants to ask because our morality is not sophisticated enough to deal with them.

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I remember kids used to say, “it’s not fair” whenever they didn’t get their way, but I would usually hear an adult respond, “Life’s not fair, get over it” It kinda made me not even look for life to always seem fair. I guess that was also because most who said it’s not fair seemed to be whining about not getting their own way.

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I could not find cause to listen to the whole video.

If someone wants to describe deception to someone else, then the goal is to convey intended meaning intact. A fair way to convey intended meaning intact is to use words that have the same meaning for everyone sharing the same goal: to convey intended meaning intact.

A fair way to deceive, on the other hand, is to use words that mean the opposite of the previously agreeable meaning.

It is fair for me to deceive you, while it is not fair for you to deceive me.

It is right for me to deceive you, because I am exceptional, and it is unwise for you to deceive me because you may then be sent to the gulag for a tenner.

1

It's a short video so it would be fair to only comment on the points specifically made. Having never uttered the words that's not fair I'm not inclined to be fair and talk about what the video does not.

My main problem with these kinds of positions is there obvious simplicity. It is particularly striking in this video with the cavalier statement that my money is as good as yours. The fact that in polite English it should have been your money is as good as mine is telling. The objectivist perspective of enlightened self interest is extreme individualism. The collectivist talking about the same topic would say your money is the result of our collective effort. Both perspectives as it turns out are "true".

The problem with both perspectives is that they are at odds with biology, instincts, "human nature". Our large, complex, social structures we refer to as civilizations are "unnatural". Because evolution works slowly and the principle of conservation is universal we have fish, reptile, chimpanzee and human brains. Autonomous responses are fish like, environmental preferences are reptilian, basic social skills are chimp like and complex language is human. In many ways cultural evolution has out stripped instinctual evolution and predispositions are left incompatible with civilization. We are more chimp like instinctually than human. That was not a problem when we lived in small groups in which reciprocal altruism and group selection played less of a role. As group size increased and specialization took hold E. O. Wilson's statement socialism: great idea wrong species became less obvious. Civilization makes us ant like.

Of course instinctual evolution never stopped and humans have adapted to group selection. But that evolution is in flux. There are a wide range of personality types more or less adapted to group and individual selection. Due to self domestication some traits are common to individuals that lean towards group or individual selection. This isn't a phenomenon that is even uniquely humans. Social insects could be though of as self domesticated and some elements of Chimpanzee and Elephant society are examples of self domestication. Because of complex culture however human self domestication has a different nature. Complex culture and civilization created a rapidly evolving environment almost impossible to adapt to. Natural selection doesn't have time to work in such an environment.

(Continued below)

(I'm typing on my phone so I will continue here 🙂 )

The point is we are a messed up species not nearly as evolved as Sharks or Ants who are perfectly adapted to their environment. Other species have had tens of millions of years to adapt. We have only had ten thousand years to adapt to civilization.

We like our chimpanzee relatives are adapted to tribes. Tribes that while not unadapted to group selection still have a primitive instinct for fairness. The ant does not ask if it is fair, the ant simply goes about the business of increasing it's groups fitness. For humans in a complex social structure what tribe or caste an individual feels associated with is often ad odds with the larger society. It is an exaggerated form of multilevel selection. Little wonder we are often confused and revert to individual selection.

I understand that all of this may be confusing to anyone not familiar with ideas such as the difference between individual and group selection. Google is your friend. To cover this topic in detail would require many pages of references. I'm just making some general observations.

Returning to the specifics on fairness humans could be said to have wild and domesticated instincts for justice. Neither of which are adequate to form an emotional basis for civilization. We will never be ants so socialism will continue to fail. Neither will we abandon are chimpanzee instinct for fairness and become objectivists.

We can adopt an instinctually unsatisfying preference for meritocracy restrained by artificial limits on hierarchical tyranny. We call such a system liberal democracy. My preference is for a constitutional republic yours may vary. We don't adopt capitalism because it is fair or efficient but rather because it is adaptive to our confused instincts.

Thank you. Well stated!

@PamelaSteele

Thank you for reading a long and winding post.

I want to offer another analogy. There is some historical precedent for what we are experiencing. The U.S. is not the first Republic or Democracy. There is Rome and Athens and other less well known examples that I can't recall off the top of my head. I think we can dismiss Athens because pure democracy has technical issues that cannot be overcome in a modern expansive and heterogeneous society. It may have not worked well in a city state of a few thousand voters but it certainly cannot work in a diverse society with regional interests. That leaves us with Rome to contend with.

Rome was a brutal war like culture when it was a republic. It's success largely dependent on the willingness of small land owners to defend it at all cost. There were many times it was on the verge of being overrun but it seemed able to always raise another army of patriots. What made it work was "morality". Roman morality was not of the kind that your average modern reader could associate with. It had a value hierarchy of loyalty, honor, patriarchy, family, religion and state. The basic values of any agrarian society that was dependent on foresight, self sacrifice and order. In such a society what is fair is what will insure the next harvest and provide reasonable stockpiles of necessities. What insures the next harvest is that the right people are in charge. Agrarian societies are necessarily at odds with the lose social structures of nomads or hunter gathers.

Success, what the roman's came to call luxus, was a direct result of the stability that the Republicans had sacrificed for. Out of that stability capitalism became the creator of fantastic wealth. The merchant, politicians, investors came to dominate society not land holders. It did not however go the route of Athens and become more egalitarian, it was by that time too large and diverse for pure democracy. It became just another empire which was the natural way of the world at that time. It was however an empire like non other because of it's republican roots. The powerful were still nominally dependent on the will of Roman citizens. A population no longer rooted in traditional morality or agrarian values. Fairness had taken on a whole new meaning. Out of luxus grew bread and circus for the masses. It was simply cheaper and easier to buy off the less successful than to incorporate them into the economy, an economy largely based on slave labor. As long as the average citizen thought that distribution was fair, fair no longer meaning sustainable, the rich and powerful could do as they like.

You may or may not agree with Gibbon that Christianity was the down fall of Roman but for the purposes of our analogy we will simply accept it. Christianity could probably never have evolved in an agrarian society. It's egalitarian and eschatological leanings are too at odds with stability. A society already in a state of luxus and income disparity however was the perfect breading grounds for certain segments of society to abandon their traditions and embrace a new religion. We reached this stage of social evolution in the 60s. A different but somewhat similar stage happened in Russia in 1915 for different reason when they adopted the religion of communism.

The new religion of the 60s was in some ways similar to Christianity. It was egalitarian in that it rejected all of the existing hierarchies. It was a religion that allowed it's followers to reject the smothering morality of loyalty, honor, patriarchy, family, religion and state. It allowed the Hippies to embrace what I would call Chimpanzee instincts and reject the culturally evolved instincts of group selection. Everything was about individual selection or individuality. What confuses people is that Chimpanzee instincts are no less ethnocentric than those of complex social structures they are just more fluid. The tribe will allow no variance from it's own set of rules and identity. You can see this in the odd conformity in dress, language, drug choices, sexual habits, and political views of the hippies. The hippies came from the same upper middle class that provides us with "democratic socialist" and AntiFa.

What really distinguishes the hippies from the other social movements of the time is how ineffectual they were. While a poor black preacher from the impoverished south was transforming society they were failing to end an unpopular war. They did however grow up to be the "successful" children of upper middle class parents. Adopting many of the accouterments of the group selected social structure they claimed to despise. What they didn't lose was their sense of fairness. A sense of fairness that took root in luxus not the soil of agrarian practicality.

It's a small step from the fairness of live and let live to the fairness of equity, diversity and inclusion. It's also the case that where luxus exists that meritocracy is not defined by competence so much as branding. What school you went to, how attractive or well spoken your are and all the other Yin values become critical aspects of social economic success. Fairness in this environment becomes giving away what you have not produced to maintain the illusion of morality.

The final contradiction to dispel is that collectivism is associated with the rejection of individual selection personality traits. It's the ant that completely rejects individual selection and is the extreme example of group selection or for our purposes collectivist equity. The ant does not strive for placement in a hierarchy but accepts that the queen is it's master. The ant does not care about fairness or equity. The ant does not pass on it's genes the colony does so and group selection determines fitness. If we were ants we would have no need for competition at the individual level and ethnocentrism would determine fitness. In is in this way that collectivism always fails in humans.

We are not a fully group selected species. Like the chimpanzee we have a sense of wild justice that requires equitable distribution within the limits of a relaxed hierarchy but there is no instinctual basis for group selection to ensure fitness. At the same time our culturally evolved sense of justice that leans towards group selection has no mechanism or instinct for individual selection and can be as mindless as ants devoid of individuality. We are obsessed with fairness but their is no emotionally satisfying way to achieve it. We become trapped in dystopian dreams trying to satisfy that which cannot be satisfied. We lean left or we lean right dependent on the peculiarities of genetically acquired personalities.

1

Socialism sucks. Crony Capitalism sucks.
Free markets provide equality of opportunity. Our current system is run by crony capitalism, wherein opportunity is purchased through lobbying and financial contributions to political candidates and parties. We need to divorce political power from wealth, and thereby achieve truly free markets and equality of opportunity.

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