Fairness Is the Foundation of Everything, But Protecting Fairness Sometimes Requires Restraining Sympathy

KangAi Commune is only a very small mutual-aid organization, but after running it for so many years, I have come to feel more and more deeply that fairness is the foundation of everything.

As long as people believe the rules are fair, many things can keep going even when there are disagreements and difficulties. Because people believe the rules are not aimed at anyone and do not favor anyone.

But the truly hard part is achieving fairness — and making people believe in it.

Because fairness sometimes runs against human instinct. Showing personal consideration to one particular person, granting them some flexibility, looks more humane; but if every special case can break the rules, that is not necessarily fair to those who faithfully keep to the covenant.

So fairness sometimes means precisely restraining sympathy, refusing exceptions, and upholding rules that do not look especially “warm.”

This is the difficulty KangAi Commune faces so often: it is not that we are unwilling to be flexible, but that every act of flexibility requires us to ask — if the same situation happened to everyone, would this approach still hold?

What we understand by fairness is not giving everyone the same outcome, but applying the same rules to the same situations, matching different responsibilities to different rights, and being able to explain and test those differences.

This is true of a small mutual-aid organization, and probably true of larger organizations and of society itself.

Fairness does not always feel comfortable, but only fairness that stands up to consistent application can create truly lasting trust.

And trust is the foundation on which an organization can keep running over the long term.