‘Fairness’ need not be “dead” as a human experience. We can return it to our public discourse, to our politics, and to our collective experience. But it will take a major overhaul of our mindset.
As you know if you’re a regular reader here, I’ve been discussing in my recent blogs the question of basic fairness in our public discourse and in our collective life. Last Thursday and Friday I look a look at the New York Times’ handling of a story about GOP presidential candidate John McCain. Yesterday I mentioned a lawsuit filed by Duke University lacrosse players against the school that canceled its entire season after what turned out to be false rape allegations against a handful of players.
The larger issue for me around all of this, and to me the impacting question, is: What would it take for fairness to return to our expressions of life on this planet?
For me the answer is obvious. We have to change our mindset about who we are in relationship to each other. We have to drop our idea that we are somehow separate from each other, and reshape our Separation Sociology.
Currently we live in a world in which the Cultural Story is that You are over there and I am over here. This derives from a larger story that says that God is “over there” and we are “over here.” It is all part of what I call Separation Theology.
I have said before that a Separation Theology produces a Separation Cosmology. That is, a cosmological way of looking at all of Life which holds that everything is separate from everything else.
A Separation Cosmology produces a Separation Sociology. That is, a way of socializing the human species that separates every person from every other person by declaring their interests to be separate.
A Separation Sociology produces a Separation Pathology. That is, pathological behaviors of self-destruction – engaged in individually and collectively.
We can bring an end to all of this–and an end to the unfairness of life as we are collectively creating it–with one shift in our mindset. All we have to do is begin to see ourselves, each of us, as an integral part of a Whole. That is, we simply have to perceive that We Are All One.
Even as the fingers on our hand are different but not divided, so, too, are we all different from each other, but in no way divided or separate. Neither from each other, nor from God.
Now if we understood that, and, more than understanding it, made it part of our living reality, inserting it as more than a concept, but as an operational truth in our every day interactions, we could change the world over night.
And we would rarely be “unfair” with each other in any deliberate way, because we would experience directly that being unfair with each other was being unfair with ourselves. We would “do unto others” as we would have it done unto us.
Wow, now there’s a novel idea…