h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I am always a little amused by the concept of 'fairness'. I can see it being useful in societal terms, everyone playing fair and not trying to take advantage and get more than a fair share and so on. This surely has a role to play in keeping groups working together.

It is the “Life’s not fair” complaint that gets me. Please show me where in your contract it explicitly states that you will be given a fair shake. You haven’t got one have you. Let’s have a look at the religious contract then. Most of the mainstream religions I know of, and I have known a few, ducky, make no reference to any idea that life is fair. Indeed in most cases it is the reverse. They seem to be mostly set up as apologies for this existence.

“Yes I know, life sucks, and sorry about that but it’s basically the way it works out. You ask why bother? Well you bother because it will all work out after you are dead. Yes really, you have my word on that. I know you aren’t going to be in any position to do anything about it if I fail to come up with the goods at that time, but you just have to trust me. After you are dead, everything is going to be lovely, think of the loveliest things you can, like watching Arsenal win the European Champions League 9-0 against Barcelona whilst Kate Beckinsale gently interferes with your body and feeds you scallops. Yes that will be yours. Why trust me? Because you have to. What better deal have you got? See, trust me and you are a winner. Don’t trust me and you’ll be lucky to get Nora Batty slapping you over the head with half a pound of tripe.”

So there you go, nothing about this life being fair. Come to think of it, the next one might not be fair on some people either. I imagine Kate Beckinsale’s paradisiacal fantasies do not include feeding scallops to people like me, and I bet there are a lot of people like me, so she might have her hands full, in a manner of speaking.

So what happens in life is neither fair nor unfair. This is just a concept humans have invented to hide away the truth of reality. Humans think that life “ought” to be OK for everyone, when it obviously is not. How else do you explain away how good people often experience the most awful tragedies in their lives, while truly obnoxious people live apparently charmed, fulfilled and enjoyable ones?

Fair and unfair also gave birth to the bastard child luck. Like fairness, this also doesn’t exist outside the realms of human wishful thinking. Things just happen. There are causal relationships between a vast number of events. We are aware of some of the events, and also some relationships which are obvious. In many circumstances we do have enough information to have a reasonable chance of guessing what will happen next. But we don’t have ALL the information; ever.

Sometimes the information we lack is not significant and so does not affect the outcome. Sometimes it is and it does. That’s when we call it luck. If I know the six winning numbers in the lottery beforehand, then it cannot be described as a lucky win. If I don’t know the numbers but take a guess (the basis of the game I am lead to believe) and correctly guess them, then I am a lucky bastard. Wrong. As I said before, in the first instance I was aware of all the significant events and linkages, in the second I wasn’t. That’s all. Knowledge and the lack of it is all there is.

It can be summed up in a quote from Gary Player (champion golfer in the 60’s & 70’s) who when asked whether he thought that it was true what people said, that he was a “lucky” golfer, replied “I found that the more I practiced, the luckier I got.”

That’s it. There is no fair, no luck. Most of the bad stuff that happens to people is a result of them being ignorant d**kheads. Exceptions are where bad stuff happens because other people are ignorant d**k heads. This doesn’t stop me using words like luck and fair, they are very useful in communicating with other humans. And there is no law that says I have to be consistent either. This is a journal not a scientific article.