"Life isn't fair," he'd say complacently, almost smugly, as if it fucking pleased him to finally be the one who got to hand out this irritating-as-shit, bitter pill, dispensing the daily dose of 'fuck you,' just as he was (I assume) similarly dismissed as a child.
And so we grow up with this gnawing inside of us, this emptiness, this hunger for fairness, this sense that we matter, that our feelings count.
As you get older, you either look for opportunities to settle the score (road rage, cheating, cutting in line, helping yourself to the last piece of something all the while knowing full well that somebody else wanted that. And rather than sharing, taking the edge off and enjoying the benevolence of that, instead we hoard, we turn inward, we try to slake our thirst, assuage our hunger by giving nothing back), or you simply seethe, and boil, and resent the shit out of everybody who's got it better than you.
Which is pretty much par for the course, human nature, normal, near as I can tell.
Maybe that's what it is, as Cap'n Jack said in one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies:
Take what you can, give nothing back!That's just how people are.
Altruism, then, is more about having been caught at being selfish one too many times, and the relational cost thereof being higher than simply giving in to the other person's desire to have some of what we have.
In other words, underneath our basic selfishness, we know we need other people, so we do what we have to to keep them around. But there's always a tension between the two, the dance of testing the limits to see how far the bond will stretch before it breaks altogether. And most of us don't like to test it that far; most of us, when there seems to be some strain, will patch things up just enough to keep the thing going. Kind of like pouring just enough oil into that old beater car's engine - never enough to really make it run right, just enough to keep it from stopping altogether.
So there you go: Some people are assiduous about checking their oil, tidying this, tidying that, paying bills, taxes, etc., what have you. But are these same people equally concerned about maintaining the relationships in their lives?
See, this all comes up because I spoke to a 'friend' today, who is quite clearly in the 'fair weather' category, and was struck by how hard he was trying to patch things up with me.
Why? I don't know. Several times that I talked with him recently (about a sort of business-y matter) he was very abrupt with me, cut me off in ways that I felt were rude, and so finally this last time, when he finally seemed inclined to be a bit more chatty, I cut him short and was abrupt in turn. In other words, I made no effort to hide my irritation. I think he was a little surprised, a little hurt, a little shocked, and wanted to make amends.
But I hate having to do
Wait a minute. I think I maybe just got something (yes, another one of those 'light bulb'
moments that I have a thousand times before an idea actually sticks) - this is about boundaries, isn't it?You know, no matter how many times I write down 'boundaries' on some Post-it and stick it somewhere so I won't forget, I still forget. And every so often I have this "D'oh!" moment where I go, oh yeah, frickin' boundaries again. THAT ol' thing!
Well, here it is again.
So, grasshopper, what do we learn from this today?
That trust is a - something? - that needs constant maintenance. That it cannot be taken for granted. And when it IS taken for granted, bad things happen: People get angry, relationships get trashed.
I'm sure there's more to that, but it's all I can think of for now.
***
Back again, thought of something I want to add, from a National Geographic article about a study on whether monkeys have a sense of fairness:
The question of whether human aversion to unfair treatment—now shown by other primates—is an evolved behavior or the result of the cultural influence of large social institutions like religion, governments, and schools, in the case of humans, has intrigued scientists in recent years.
The new finding suggests evolution may have something to do with it. It also highlights questions about the economic and evolutionary nature of cooperation and its relationship to a species' sense of fairness[...]
"It looks like this behavior is evolved … it is not simply a cultural construct. There's some good evolutionary reason why we don't like being treated unfairly,"
Brosnan, a biology Ph. D. candidate schooled in zoology and psychology at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Living Links Center at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, said her research was inspired, in part, by studies into human cooperation conducted by Swiss economist Ernst Fehr, who found that people inherently reject unfairness.
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