XIII - JUSTICE

What is just, what is fair, what is right? These questions have been debated since before the existence of language. Some animals besides ourselves seem to have a primitive sense of justice linked to dominance-submission relationships and past experience. But only humans could have possibly invented concepts of justice so entangled and complicated as our own. We have laws, customs, traditions, and expectations both local and cultural, a whole social framework of established interpersonal relationships; assumed, presumed, granted and denied privileges, rights, obligations and duties, all defended under the rationale of justice, of a distinction between what is right and what is wrong.

The problem is that right and wrong are mythically based. By right and wrong, I do not mean something being factually right or wrong, such as an answer to an arithmetic problem or whether today is Monday or Tuesday. I mean right or wrong as related to some standard of human behavior.

That standard, or rather, that set of standards for judging the acceptability of human actions and relationships is what we call justice. Every culture and subculture has its own. No two are identical and they keep changing. The evolution of justice is a result of the progression of group myth. Justice is the necessary demonstration of certain key morals, such as fellow tribe members should be safe from willful harm from others. We need those morals to be true in the world and people to live in such a way as to make them so.

Justice depends on mythic overlap. Two individuals or two groups will not be able to agree on what is just unless the morals in question are supported by both. The more disparate the myths, the more injustice will be perceived.

If there is conflict of myth, there will be conflict of people unless some kind of agreement can be reached creating shared morals. A shared moral of tolerance is a good place to start, where both sides allow some legitimacy to the differing morals of the other.

Who sets the standards, and what shall they be? Religions are heavily into the right-and-wrong business and usually have some code of justice that the believers claim originated with a divine source so much more alpha than thou that to question it is in itself wrong. Religion is not alone. Almost every system of justice is not sympathetic to people who question its validity.

Religion as a valid source for standards of justice comes from its being a major mythic source. If most or preferably all members of a group share the same religion, then they will have enough mythic overlap to be able to agree on standards of justice. The particular standards of that community, even though based in a religion of wide acceptance, will be set by the alphas of that group. Justice is defined by the alphas as they set the myth, so we find that in all systems of justice, religion-based or not, the alphas enjoy greater privilege and protection than the masses.

One action generally perceived as unjust is to block the progression of the myth of another in ways that keep it apart from how the group would have it played. That is to say, members of the group are seen as having a right to live by the group myth.

Any group will allow its members to follow the group myth. Even in the meanest dictatorship on earth you are free to do what the government tells you to do. But that is not enough freedom for many people. Repressive governments are not popular with those who resent being squashed. We like to be able to pursue individual myth and the myths of subgroups within the culture, even if they contradict the myth of the larger group. We have freedom to the extent the culture’s myth as enforced upon us gives us slack to pursue our optimum mythic progressions.

Fairness
In our myths we have for each of our roles standards of status, behavior, privilege, responsibility, and obligation we depend on to know what to do. We accept these as givens, so when we get worse treatment, a worse deal, than we expect as our due, we call it unfair. Fairness happens when the myth’s role standards are met. When you say someone has acted unfairly, you are saying he has violated the standards of the role and therefore stands outside the myth, not to be seen as alpha, not a group member in good standing.

A sense of fairness can arise from either personal or group mythic role standards. Much disagreement among people over what is fair comes from role standards arising from disparate personal myths. They are more apt to agree on those based in group myths they share. A common group standard is that while people in different roles have different privileges and responsibilities, people in similar roles should all live under the same rules and be treated equally. Inequality is typically justified by claiming one set of people to have a role different from the rest. Yet whether or not the role difference justifies the inequality is an arbitrary decision. In the United States a hundred years ago we did not let women vote. Now we do. We chose to make the change. The women were the same, but we decided the differences between their roles and men’s were no longer a sufficient reason to deny them the vote. Female suffrage is part of a larger convergence of male and female roles in this country.

You hear people say that life is not fair. What they are saying is that events in one’s life do not always follow the expectations raised by the standards of their myths. We like to blame life for the fallacies of our myths. We would do better to fix our myths and also take action to improve our lives.

To speak as if life has it wrong and our myth is right is all backwards. Life is the reality. The myth is only the theoretical model we operate under. We like to believe the myth is true, but ultimately truth belongs to life, not to myth. Our confusion comes from seeing life as a character within our myth and thus inside its bounds. However, life is not a character, but a reality outside the myth. As such life is never unfair; it is beyond fairness.

Limits to Freedom
The level of freedom is different in every group and it changes with each group’s mythic progression. No group has infinite freedom for then the group myth would not hold the members and the group would fall apart. A group with infinite freedom would be one in which the members had no commitment to the moral priorities of the group myth and therefore no commitment to the group myth itself, so the group would have no meaningful membership.
A group myth based on a policy of “do your own thing” for everyone is not completely free. It will restrict the ability of some members to control the actions of others. The freedom will always have restrictions. They are essential to the existence of a viable group myth.

The group draws a line around its myth. Cross the line and you are outside, no longer a member in good standing. The question of justice is largely one of where to draw the line.

The line will be drawn to give more freedom in some matters than in others, depending on which morals are most important to group identity. This edge of the myth will also be set such that most of the members, especially those of lower status, will find it difficult if not impossible to live without crossing the line. Most of the transgressions will be minor, but they all threaten the status of the members, who will then be insecure. The members will then give the group greater support to protect their status. They will also support or at least accept a system of hazing which further binds the members to the group.

However, if the standards of justice are too narrow, the group will alienate its deviant members. They will see the game is rigged, they can’t win, so why play? They will cease to believe in the group myth and become a subculture with its own group myth and standards of justice at odds with the larger group myth.

The limits of acceptable behavior will vary according to how frequently they are violated by the group. If everyone follows all the rules, then small deviations from the group’s ideals of behavior will become significant and rules will be passed which tighten the standards, to a point at which violations again occur. Thus the group role of black sheep will always be filled.

Likewise, if there is an increase in major infractions of the rules, minor misdeeds will be overlooked and the behavior standards will slacken. But there will always be standards of behavior and they will always be set so there is a level of violation of them that enhances group stability and the dominance of the higher status members.

When members of more than one group interact, there are usually standardized actions expected of them to enable them to get along, such as courtesy and polite behavior. There may be mutually understood dominance-deference relationships not to be violated. There may be permitted topics of conversation with other topics prohibited. The classic rule at dinner parties is do not talk about sex, politics, or religion.

Largely, what is right and what is wrong is something that each individual, each group, each culture must work out for itself and in conjunction with its neighbors. I have very clear ideas personally as to what is right and what is just, and I bet you do, too. We agree on some things and disagree on others.

In getting along with others we need to have a clear sense of priority of enforcement. Some wrongs must not be permitted, others are less important, down to where right and wrong merge into questions of preference and taste, the mythic moral slack we need to grant to others and they to us, that we may all be able to reasonably play our different myths.