For a good part of my career, I sat in the middle of other people’s disputes. When it went well, both sides came around and said, “I think that’s fair.” That was their word. Mine was different. I was thinking, that’s just the right thing to do. And if you asked who won, the honest answer was that both sides did.
Three words came out of that room: fair, right, and won. Those are the three ways most of us measure how life is going, and how we measure has a lot to say about whether we can value anyone, ourselves included.
The ledger, the scoreboard, and the standard
Here are the three measures, each with its own question:
- Fair watches the ledger. It asks, “Did I get what they got?”
- Win watches the scoreboard. It asks, “Did I come out ahead?”
- Right watches the standard. It asks, “Did I do right?”
Look at where each one points. Fair looks at other people, because you can’t know whether you got what they got without looking at what they got. Win looks at other people too, because you can’t come out ahead of no one. Right is the only one of the three that looks at you. It measures your own conduct against your own standard.
None of the three is bad. Each one has a lane. Fair works for things that can be split: a check, the chores, taking turns. Win works in games, sports, and courtrooms, places built to have a winner. Right works for the things that can’t be split or scored: character, loyalty, truth. Trouble starts when one of them leaves its lane and takes over something it can’t settle.
Every measure is a coin
Each measure has two sides. Right and wrong. Win and lose. Fair and unfair. I call them the have side and the have-not side: love doing right and hate being wrong, love winning and hate losing, love being fair and hate unfairness.
Those aren’t the same thing turned around. The have side is about what a person reaches for. The have-not side is about what they can’t stand to have happen. And in my experience, the have-not side weighs more. I’m one who hates losing. When I won, I didn’t care that much. When I lost, I felt lousy. What we hate seems to hit about twice as hard as what we love.
Underneath the have-not side is shame. Can’t do anything wrong. Can’t lose. Can’t be unfair. A person can carry all three at once.
Control: most, some, none
What decides whether a measure helps you or hurts you is control.
Right gives you the most. You make your own decisions, and you can meet your own standard whether anybody else meets theirs or not. Win gives you some. You can choose whether to play, and in some games effort decides the outcome. Fair gives you none. You can choose your own conduct, and you can choose your contests, but you can’t choose whether life comes out even. And the not-fair side keeps your eyes on everybody else, until there’s little room left to look at yourself.
So here’s the order: Right, the most control. Win, some. Fair, none. That’s why I’ve come to believe Right should lead, with Win and Fair working for it.
Two sides of fair
The word “fair” has two sides, and they point in opposite directions.
Being fair is how you treat people: the same standard for the person you like and the person you don’t. It’s something you give, and nobody has to owe you anything for you to do it. Demanding fairness is something else. It’s the ledger life owes you. Each time someone else gets more, a line goes in the book. Life doesn’t pay those debts, and a debt that can’t be paid turns into resentment.
When results won’t even out on their own, demanded fairness evens them out the only way it can: it pulls something down. Somebody else goes down, and that feels like justice. In the book I put it this way: “Fair can be settled by both people going down. Right can only be settled by both coming up.”
So what does fair look like when it’s brought inside? It isn’t “I decide what’s fair.” That just puts me in the judge’s seat over everybody else’s ledger. The inside version is smaller and harder: “I have to be fair to me.” It doesn’t keep score on the other person. It asks whether I’m counting my own cost.
And when fair can’t settle something, there’s a better question than “What’s fairest?” Look for the best scenario instead. Fair asks what you’re owed. Best asks what you can make of it.
As I wrote in Relational Mechanics, “life isn’t fair, and it was never supposed to be.” But how you deal with it, you can be.
These ideas come from Part Two of my second book, We Love What We Value: Why the Victim Can’t, and How Self-Respect Ends It, available now, in Chapters 7 through 10. It builds on my first book, Relational Mechanics, available now.
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