Fairness

“Hey – that’s not fair!”

We’ve all heard this complaint multiple times as we raise our children. Mom puts two cookies on two paper plates out in the backyard for the kids and the older one gobbles hers down quickly. Soon she’s eating her little brother’s cookie too. Screams and tears bring mom in as the referee to mediate the hardships taking place.

Often similar complaints taint the joyful sounds of Christmas as the kids try to get this sharing thing down. “Suzie won’t give me a turn!” “I was playing with this, and she came and took it away from me!” As I watch my grandkids, I realize that those smartphones keeping the little ones occupied while we are all at a restaurant seem to get yanked out of the weaker one’s hands a little too regularly. Then mom gives it to yet another child, and now only one out of four is happy. It’s just not fair! 

A child doesn’t need to be taught that they are being taken advantage of. When someone else eats your cookie or steals a toy right out of your hands, common sense tells you it’s just not right. Do we need a written law for these offenses? Of course not.

The fascinating lesson in all of this is the obvious doctrine of fairness that is recognized by all little children. In his book Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis illustrates how common sense prevails among children at an early age. Lewis shows that children and adults have a moral awareness that kicks in when they say things like, “How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?” Or, “That’s my seat, I was there first” – “Leave him alone, he’s not hurting you.” – “Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bite of mine.”

Lewis says these children were appealing to some kind of standard behavior which the child expects the other child to know about. “Both parties had in mind some kind of Law, or Rule of fair play or decent behavior or morality or whatever you want to call it, about which they really agreed.” These Natural Laws, driven by a sort of moral awareness, never really go away. We just get good at twisting basic common sense principles to our liking – especially as we get older.

Personal Want Distorts Law (and reality)

When David Frost interviewed Richard Nixon about the Watergate affair, it was riveting to watch Nixon squirm as he twisted the real truth to match his own reality. There are at least two pieces of that interview that stand out. One is when Frost asks Nixon about the $219,000 of hush money, and Nixon claims he thought it was for a specific charity. Frost asks the obvious question, “If it was for a charity, why was it all in cash in a duffel bag, and placed in a phone booth in the middle of the night?” Nixon could not respect the law (or truth), beyond his own appetite.

Personal want distorts law (and reality). If we have a greater desire to fulfill our own appetite than we do the law, we could also find ourselves interviewing with a reporter. This happened to Nixon. 

He revealed his appetite for his own reality over truth when he made the statement that “When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal, by definition.” This interview is the most widely viewed interview of a former president in history. Sadly, millions watched an admittedly bright ex-American president fumble around as he massaged the truth to his liking. It was like he had swallowed a stolen diamond ring and was denying it, while the audience was looking at a live X-ray of his stomach! Poor Richard Nixon. His habit of bending truth and covering it up turned out to dominate his legacy more than all the good he had accomplished. 

Common Sense

Common sense should have told him this entire escapade of stealing papers from the DNC did not differ from stealing his younger sibling’s cookies. It was wrong. I believe the older we get; we tend to allow behaviors that even as children, we would not have tolerated because of the expected penalty.

When judgment clouds common sense, the price can be immeasurable. Some won’t recognize the rigid boundaries of the legal system beyond their own desires. Others rationalize poor decisions or behavior for a short-term gain or pleasure. However, when we distort truth by shrinking it and placing it into our own version of reality, there will be a day of reckoning. 

Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Bernie Madoff, Jeff Skilling (Enron), Donald Trump, and a long list of others that broke the barrier of common sense and went deeper into a funnel of misdeeds. In every case, the deeper they found themselves in their falsehoods, the more the noose tightened as their defense just couldn’t catch up with their lies. Common sense should have told Nixon he would get caught. Common sense should have told Clinton that others in the West Wing knew exactly what was going on. Common sense should have told Madoff and Skilling that a wind was coming to knock down their house of cards. Common sense should have told Trump that his advisors were telling him what he wanted to hear and there was a reason they threw his 61 court cases out. All of these pushed ahead at incredible cost because of a false sense of truth. They lied to themselves first, and then to anyone who would listen.

At the root of good, healthy living is this thing we call common sense. It is the foundation of all Natural Law. It’s the thing that the guy on the street instinctively understands and needs no Constitution or set of ordinances to make him aware of. He just knows it. It existed during childhood and endures to this day. He knows that when we remove common sense from any situation, something will break.

Society cannot function well when we impugn common sense. San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, have taken away common sense approaches to crime and drugs and are feeling the impact. These once beautiful cities are in fast decline because the leadership thought they found a new and humane way to deal with drugs and law-breakers. In so doing, they created a mass cross-country immigration of addicts to their lawless cities where they tolerate flagrant drug use on the street. If it makes no sense, something is going to break. 

You wouldn’t take a dozen small children and put them in a room with only three toys and let the kids figure out who gets the video game on their own. They would jerk it out of each other’s hands and look for an authority figure to come and restore order. There would definitely be cries of unfairness. There would be no sense in an experiment like this.

Yet this is exactly what Portland, Oregon, did in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder. Portland’s leadership listened to calls to defund the police. The city cut $15 million from the police bureau’s budget and cut the number of sworn officers by 8%. The city has now set homicide records in each of the last two years, property crimes have surged, public disorder such as camping and drug use is rampant. It ranks 48th among the 50 largest cities in the U.S. in its ratio of police officers to population at 1.26 officers per 1000 residents.

Portland’s leadership chose folly over common sense, and now the entire community is in decline. This once great city is not alone. It is merely a leader in the club of municipalities that have failed the segment of hard-working, tax-paying people that really are doing their fair share of contributing to a healthy community. San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, and others lined up to be in the “Nonsense Club,” failing to prosecute criminals, and allowing crime to proliferate.

“Hey, that’s not fair,” is the cry of every contributing citizen as communities watch what happens when good, old-fashioned common sense is thrown out for the latest form of municipal negligence.

Much of our dysfunction comes down to simple common sense. It’s crazy that even the children get it. Why can’t we?