Fairness, Unfairness, and Anger

What do the following situations have in common?

"Susie's crayon is bigger than mine."
"If you can have an affair, why can't I?"
"Your school can't enter the Science Fair this year because your students took First Prize for the last five years."
"I had him killed because he ratted on me to the police."
"I'm suing the modeling agency because they discriminate against short people."
"He violated the code of the hood. We have a right to punish traitors."

Each of these situations arises out of a real or perceived unfairness. Most of us hate unfairness. We learned to hate it before we ever went to kindergarten. Our attitudes towards unfairness, towards the perpetrators and towards ourselves were formed early in our lives. They are firmly held and fiercely defended. These attitudes, which have not been identified or examined since the day they were formed, are at the heart of much of the "aggression," "stress," "tension," "hostility" and violence that are shredding the fabric of our communities, our work places, our relationships and our lives. If we can find a way to replace such mistaken attitudes with more appropriate ones maybe all this shooting will die down and we can get our civilization back.

Our team "fairnessness" refers to the absurd, often destructive behaviors that arise out of unrealistic attitudes towards fairness. When Freddie, "The Fairness Freak" Filbert encounters an unfairness, his pre-set attitudes kick in. They fire all at once.

• "This situation is unfair to me. It confirms my expectation that life may be fair to others but it is always unfair to me. That's not fair."
• "I am the innocent victim of this unfairness. I do not deserve to be treated in this fashion. I did nothing to provoke this injustice."
• "My sensitivity to unfairness makes me superior to those individuals who do not have my high ideals."
• "My outrage at this injustice makes me morally superior to those who perpetrate and condone unfairness."
• "Unfairness is wrong. It is my moral responsibility to stand in judgment upon evil doers and punish them for their trespasses."
• "It is my good intention to make this a better world by eliminating unfairness perfectly and replacing it with fairness."
• "Unfairness, injustice and wrongness make me angry. My anger is painful. I am entitled by the laws of fairness to relieve my pain by causing an equal amount of pain in the evil doer."
• "My anger is an entirely justified moral indignation which enables me to overcompensate for my underlying feelings of inferiority and inadequacy to cope with real problems."
• "I can use this moral outrage as a way of exempting myself from the everyday tasks of love, work and friendship at which I'll probably fail anyway."
• "As a victim of this unfairness, I am entitled to full restitution for my suffering. If I ever stop suffering, I will lose my entitlement. Under these circumstances, it doesn't pay to stop suffering from unfairness. I must keep looking for fresh unfairnesses forever."
• "I cannot be happy as long as there is injustice and suffering in the world. Only when the world is perfectly free of unfairness will I allow myself or my loved ones the luxury of being happy."

These attitudes, and many others like them, are below the level of conscious awareness. They trigger Freddie's reaction each time life presents him with an unfairness, as it often does. Freddie is in no position to evaluate the appropriateness of these "triggers." He assumes that they are appropriate, relevant and realistic. He has no choice but to act upon them. That choice was made for him in early childhood and he finds himself still acting in adulthood on the basis of "decisions" made by a three year old child and who hasn't learned a thing about fairness in the interim.

Unfairness makes Freddie angry. When he is angry, his behavior can range from mild annoyance to child abuse and wife beating. The energy for these intense overreactions comes from the adrenalin which is secreted by his adrenal glands when he is in a high emotional state. The adrenalin does not "cause" the overreaction, it merely "enables" it to take place.

These behaviors do not take place in a vacuum. They exist in a personal context which we bring to each occasion of "unfairness." If our personal context is one of self-respect, our attitudes will be moderated by consideration of other people's well being, and the legitimate demands of the real world. We will behave in ways that will solve the problem and make things better.

If, however, we hold ourselves in contempt, these checks and balances will be overrun by the pressing need to relieve the pain of our existence. People who hold themselves in contempt lack insight and empathy, they control in negative, destructive ways, they overcompensate in useless ways for their painful feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. Under these conditions, they cannot solve anger problems in ways that will give them the relief that they seek. These impediments prevent them from using their judgment to solve problems. All they can do is react self-indulgently to a problem situation. They attack when they think they can win an advantage; they withdraw from the situation when they sense that they might fail. These are not conscious, well thought out decisions. These responses are based on pre-existing childhood attitudes toward happiness and success.

Freddie, for example has the attitude "I don't have time to be happy and successful because I am busy fighting unfairness." He finds himself ruining everyone's happiness at the company picnic by quibbling over an umpire's call. "It's the principle of the thing," he will say. In striving for this overcompensatory ideal of fairness, he will confirm his attitude that no one understands him, that no one appreciates him. He will feel that these people belong together, that he is a misfit who does not belong. It is a price he is willing to pay. He feels inferior to these people, but at the same time his superior ideals put him on a higher rung. He can be inferior and superior at the same time. These are both extremes and they can coexist in the same personality. What Freddie cannot feel is equality in the middle. That feeling comes with self-respect. Freddie's attitudes are not changed after these "unfairness attacks." He is unable to learn from these experiences. He will make the same overcompensatory, non-rational mistakes next time.

When two people in a relationship have differing attitudes and expectations about fairness, they will find themselves clashing every ten minutes and wondering what happened to the happiness they shared during their honeymoon period. That is all it was, a honeymoon period. After this "getting to know you" period passes into history, the underlying attitudes, misperceptions, convictions and beliefs come to the fore. Each partner tries to make the other understand the error of his or her ways, often in the name of bringing about a "fairer," more equitable distribution of the rights and privileges that the relationship was meant to provide. This good intention only insults the other partner's intelligence and makes the relationship worse. The other partner feels victimized emotionally. This is often followed by physical victimizations as the misunderstanding escalates.

For example, Freddie has the attitude: "I expect perfect fairness from my wife and it is her job to give it to me." If his wife, Alice, had the attitude, "My husband expects me to be perfectly fair to him and I am only too happy to live up to his expectations," there would be no clash. There would be perfect harmony. She would give and he would take. That is his definition of perfect fairness. He would criticize and she would accept his criticism, he would demand, she would obey, he would send her thought messages, for example, "I want an apple" and she would bring him the fruit bowl. Freddie would be happy at last.

Since Alice does not have this hypothetical attitude, this hardly ever happens. Freddie, therefore, cannot be "happy" in his marriage. He becomes very angry when his unreasonable, irrational expectations are not being fulfilled. When Alice is scrubbing the floor instead of tending to his "legitimate" needs, he says, "All you ever think of is yourself." In his book, anyone who doesn't think of his welfare constantly is selfish and guilty of irresponsibility. He feels deprived, and to be deprived is to be victimized. Since it isn't "fair" to victimize nice persons like himself, he becomes very angry. His anger, then, has many facets that need to be identified before they can be properly relieved.

Freddie justifies and maintains his absurd expectations using the immature logic of a four year old: "If I am good to Alice, she is supposed to be good to me. That's fair." That sounds reasonable, but it is not. Freddie has his own definition of goodness. He feels that giving her ten dollars a week for food is "generous," He is a "good" provider. When he doesn't hit her as hard as he might, he feels that he has been "considerate" even "chivalrous," and is entitled to compensation for his "gentlemanly restraint." Alice, however, doesn't see these actions as good. She does not understand his expectation that she will reciprocate by being good to him. He tries to make her understand that she is guilty of the crime of failure to reciprocate fairly. She tries to make him understand that his irrational behaviors are causing her pain. When she is in pain, she is in no mood to "appreciate" his fictitious goodness or to make him happy.

The truth is that neither one of them understands what is going on below the surface, nor wants to. Each one has the "good intention" to "improve" the other in ways that can only backfire. Alice, like many people, imagines that her marriage problems can be resolved by using rational thought processes. Her underlying attitude is, "I am rational, my husband is rational, we can talk things out like civilized human beings." However, when she approaches Freddie to talk about the electric bill, Freddie is not listening to her with his brains, he is hearing her words through a dense fog of mistaken attitudes, perceptions and expectations. These mental elements are more powerful than his intellectual capabilities. It is like they are speaking foreign languages to each other without knowing it. He hears her statement of the problem as:

a) a criticism of his management skills,
b) a reflection on his masculinity,
c) an accusation that he is in the "wrong,"
d) an attempt at victimization by a potential enemy,
e) a power struggle for control of the marriage by controlling the money,
f) a failure to appreciate his goodness for the past ten years,
g) a good intention on her part to change him into a money manager,
h) the implication that she will not accept him as he is,
i) the implication that he is not perfect and, therefore, worthless.

In other words, he takes her critical comments personally, as if they were a reflection on his worth as a person. He doesn't deserve this painful abuse. It's not fair. This implication that he is worthless and unworthy of respect is painful, too. He is a veritable layer cake of anger upon anger. Freddie's agenda is not to acquire money management skills, it is to relieve his pain as fast as he can. He overreacts and she overreacts to his overreaction. Each one is the prisoner of attitudes from the past, each one is recreating parental scenarios from childhood, each one is mismanaging their anger at the unfairness of it all. There can be no conflict resolution under these circumstances; there can be no problem solving, only one self-created crisis after another. There can be no happiness.

Freddie does not have a mature, self-respecting identity of his own. All he can do is play the roles he learned to play in childhood and never outgrew. It may seem that some of these roles are mutually exclusive, but they are not. Freddie's roles arise out of his attitudes which in turn predispose him to solve problems in ways that cannot succeed. He uses different roles as different problems arise. Sometimes he is the victim, sometimes the victimizer. Alice sees this and calls it "inconsistency." Freddie is not inconsistent. He consistently plays the role that his constellations of attitudes predispose him to play at the time.

The Idealist
In his Idealist mode, Freddie's unconscious purpose is to establish perfect fairness on earth. He cannot see what is wrong with having this high ideal, which formed in his head when he was four years old. He is not aware that he is using this High Moral End to justify the cruel, brutal means that he is employing at his wife's expense. It exempts him from feeling guilty: "There is a Higher Principle here!" There is no higher principle. There is only self-defeating overcompensation for his feelings of inferiority behind a facade of perfectionistic striving.

The Crown Prince
Another aspect of Freddie's Superiority Striving is his adoption of the Crown Prince role. He sees Alice in the role of The Lady In Waiting, The Cinderella in The Ashes, The Scullery Maid. As Crown Prince, Freddie, cannot tolerate inconvenience. He does not like to be kept waiting, for example. It causes him discomfort. A Prince should not be expected to endure discomfort after all he has done for his lowly subjects. It isn't fair. It makes him angry.

He complains to Alice about the service which is his royal right and responsibility to do. He wants his way, he is entitled by his noble birth to get it. It is unfair when he doesn't. Alice has no way of knowing that these absurd notions are boiling below the level of her husband's conscious awareness, or that she is their unwitting victim.

Freddie is working both sides of the street. When he is not The High Prince, he is the Suffering Victim. When he gets his way, he is riding high, but when Alice slips up, he feels victimized by her. He feels entitled to reparations for his suffering. He doesn't tell Alice of these expectations. It would be a sign of weakness, dependency. That would ruin the whole effect. She is supposed to figure it out by herself and make it up to him some way. That's fair. Since she is not a mind reader, she never does. She cannot understand why her husband is sore at her all the time. As a Suffering Victim, Freddie feels entitled to escape responsibility from the consequences of his own behavior. He feels entitled to special consideration. After all, he suffers terribly from the ups and downs of everyday life, and from the consequences of his own poor judgment. When Alice asks him to take out the garbage, his attitude is, "My God, woman, haven't I suffered enough for one day? Have a little mercy. Take it out yourself."

As a Supreme Suffering Victim, Freddie is superior to all other sufferers. He feels entitled to be taken care of forever because of his "sacrifices" in the name of his loved ones. None of this makes any sense to anyone but Freddie. To him it makes perfect sense. This is not the logic of self-respecting people. This is Freddie's private logic and he can't see what's wrong with it. He doesn't even want to. Why should he change when he is "winning?"

As a fairness freak, Freddie becomes incensed when he hears about Suffering Underdogs. He feels their pain. It is not their fault that they are underdogs: "They never had a chance," or "They were born that way." Either way, it is not their fault. To Freddie, it is unbearably painful that people should suffer because of circumstances beyond their control. It isn't fair. It is a Cosmic Unfairness. To Freddie, an underdog can be a starving child in Afghanistan or Peru, but not his own neglected child. An underdog can be a murderer on trial for killing nine people in a supermarket. Once again, there are "reasons" why he did it, he must have suffered as a child. In his view the inhuman "System" is crucifying a tormented soul who deserves compassion and forgiveness. It is "unfair" for the mighty Arm of the Law to crush this pitiful, hopeless creature, and Freddie cannot tolerate unfairness. None of this has any relation to reality. These are attitudes that he brings to reality from thirty years ago.

This role, too, serves the convenient purpose of elevating Freddie over those who are not as "caring" and high minded as he is. He uses the plight of these wretched creatures to relieve the pain of his own inferiority. Compared to them, he looks good. His ideal seems to be to make all the underdogs into overdogs and to grind all their oppressors into the dust. That would be doubly fair. That would be Perfection on Earth.

It should be clear by now that people like Freddie have their own definitions of fairness. To Freddie,

• Fairness means sameness, as in everyone should get an A on the test so that no one's feelings will be hurt. Freddie makes sure that each of his three kids get fourteen string beans. The kids help him count them out to make sure there is no favoritism.
• When one child is naughty, Freddie is moved to punish all of them at the same time. Why should one child get off scot-free and watch another child being punished. "It's not fair." (In Russia, they have a saying, "When all have nothing, then there will be fairness." This attitude is consistent with a diagnosis of depression, discouragement and self-contempt.)
• Fairness means getting my way.
• Fairness means always getting what I deserve and never getting what I don't deserve.
• Fairness means the perfect absence of wrongness, injustice and unfairness in the world.
• Fairness means the absence of favoritism unless it is in my favor.
• Fairness means that there should be no undeserved suffering in the world, only deserved suffering.
• Fairness means that you should appreciate my "goodness" but I don't have to appreciate yours. I've got it coming, you don't.

"Fairnessness" is a good intention. It is the absurd intention to bring about perfect fairness among imperfect people on an imperfect planet.

1. Like all good intentions, this ideal does not arise out of a reasonable assessment of the reality situation. It arises out of Freddie's need to overcompensate for this own feelings of inferiority by "proving" that he isn't inferior. He has come to feel that he can accomplish this self-serving goal by mindlessly espousing some high-sounding ideal or virtue. He appoints himself the role of enforcer and proceeds to inflict his version of this "ideal" upon people who are vulnerable to his mischief. Freddie's good intentions are not selfless and dedicated at all; they are often viciously self-indulgent.

2. Good intentions, such as the intention to bring about "fairness," are always counterproductive. They do not flow from the often regrettable realities of life. Instead, they arise out of Freddie's misperceptions of reality. Good intentions cannot make reality better, they can only make it worse. When there is a clash between his misperception and reality, Freddie will cry "Foul," but he will not see how his foolishness contributed to his own disaster. Instead of more fairness, there is more unfairness, more resentment, more pain and more confirmation of his role as the victim of unfairness..

3. Good intentions are ultimately self-destructive. Not only do they have ruinous effects on their intended beneficiaries, they tend to leave Freddie feeling that he has wasted his whole life barking up an absurdly wrong tree. When his good intentions are not rewarded, he feels good for nothing, as if his "goodness" were genuine and sincere. Paradoxically, Freddie's feelings of inferiority and worthlessness, for which he has been striving to overcompensate all these years, are confirmed over and over by his "failure" to achieve his absurd goal of perfect fairness. His relationship with his "beneficiaries" has been destroyed. He is all alone and abandoned, filled with anger and self-pity in a cauldron of self-contempt.

On a deeper level, Freddie's good intentions have another malignant purpose. Freddie is overcompensating for his out of control feeling by controlling others for their own good. He never questions the basis of his wisdom or his ability to a) predict disasters in the future and b) prevent them from happening by taking "corrective" action in the present. None of this has anything to do with common sense. Freddie is the prisoner of his "private logic" which arises out of his self-contempt. The deeper his self-contempt, the greater is his fear of disaster and the tighter is his control over anything and anyone he can get his hands on. The purpose of his absurd attitudes is to maintain the consistency of his lifestyle from the past into the present and future. Inconsistency would be chaotic; it would be the greater evil. He prefers the lesser evil of controlling in goofy ways. This deeper purpose to "control" in order to bring about justice and fair play will also prove to be self-indulgent, counter productive and self-destructive. Freddie does not know what is going to happen in ten minutes, let alone six years from now when Junior graduates college. That is why Alice's attempts to "reason" with him is no more than her good intention for his good intentions. It is madness compounded.

When Freddie doesn't know how to cope with a life situation, he feels out of control. He feels anxious about the possible exposure of his incompetence, he feels insecure and vulnerable to being hurt. He feels inferior to "smarter," more "competent" people and he hates them for their superior coping skills. He hates himself for being so "stupid." Freddie is not aware of these feelings, but they are causing him pain just the same. No one has ever taught him to look into himself and identify these feelings that have such a powerful influence on his day-to-day existence. He certainly does not know how to replace these components of his self-contempt with their corresponding components of self-respect. Under these painful circumstances, Freddie is in no condition to think clearly or act constructively. He cannot have productive real intentions which would resolve the situation in mutually beneficial ways. He can only dream up an ineffectual good intention which sounds "logical" to him.

Freddie's good intention to bring about fairness as he defines it is not based on the demands of the reality situation. He does not have a clear perception of the real problem. His behavior is influenced by his fears and attitudes from the past. His attitudes predispose him to perceive problems in terms of fairness and unfairness when that is not the issue at all. These mindless, non-rational considerations will keep him from being successful in the present. For example, when Freddie, Jr. want more milk, Freddie says, "You've already had your share." When daughter Alicia says that her brother's crayon is bigger than hers, father says, "Quit being such a baby." When his son wants a new crayon, Freddie buys him a whole box. His daughters soon learn that boys have unfair advantages that they don't have. This unfairness makes them very angry at males in general. Alfred Adler calls this attitude, "Masculine Protest." These are all good intentions. They are self-indulgent. Freddie is "proving" that he is a "caring" parent, which he is not. Good intentions are counter productive, they make things worse. There is no real guidance here, there are no logical consequences, there is no respect for the child as an imperfect human being. Worst of all, there is no modelling of self-respect for family members to see and follow.

These good intentions to achieve fairness are ultimately self-destructive. The children will grow up with the same absurd attitudes as their father. They will hold him in the contempt that he has earned. They will break his heart. That's fair. Freddie has reached the point where he wants to change his life. His way of moving through life has not worked for him or anyone else. Nothing has changed for the better and he can see that it isn't going to. He is ready to give up his useless striving for perfect fairness in favor of something that will make his life more livable with Alice's help and example of self-respect. Freddie has bottomed out. He is ready to undergo the painful process of replacing what he "knows" with what is unknown and untested. It's scary and he will need courage to replace his inappropriate attitudes with new, untried ones. He is aware now of his pain. He is willing to take the risk of change in order to get rid of it in the right way. The old way never worked. He kept hoping that someday it would. That wasn't a hope, it was an attitude.

Freddie has spent the last thirty years believing that replacing unfairness with fairness would make a difference, that his high principles had to be upheld in order to make a better world. He now sees that he knows nothing about making a better world and that he lacks the competence to pull it off even if he knew how. His new self-doubt is the beginning of wisdom. Bosses and political tyrants who "know it all" lack this rudimentary wisdom. Freddie's Homework was to stop doling out the string beans with a computer. If the child wanted more, he or she could ask. If they didn't eat every last string bean, it wasn't the end of the world. It wasn't a crime to "waste" a string bean. Freddie learned that his children were worth more than all the string beans in the world and that "fairness" had nothing to do with hungry children in Peru. He could choose to live in the here and now and enjoy it while he could without the fear of feeling selfish. He also learned that he deserves to enjoy his children's childhood while it lasted, and not waste this happiness worrying about string beans or the unfair distribution of produce in the world.

Freddie's handle in making these attitude shifts was the new attitude that he learned in counseling: "What difference does it make?" Freddie assumed since childhood that everything was important, that everything made a difference. His childhood judgment was not sophisticated enough to make fine distinctions between the extremes of important and unimportant. His naive judgment predisposed him to overreact as if every occasion of unfairness were equally earth-shaking. Now, Freddie has learned to at least ask the question, "Does it really make a difference?" Most of the time, the answer is that these things don't amount to a hill of beans. Sometimes, it does make a difference. It takes adult judgment to answer this question in appropriate, responsible ways. As a child, Freddie had only one choice. Now he has at least two. Freddie has a second handle on his fairness syndrome. He now sees that it is a childish mistake to expect perfect fairness in an imperfect world. As an adult now, he is in charge of his expectations. He can choose to replace this immature attitude with a more mature one - to take life as it comes, warts and all, and do the best he can with it. He can accept life as it is, and stop requiring that it live up to his absurd expectations. He can choose to let it go.

Freddie had thirty years of unfairness anger in his system that had never gone anywhere. He wanted to get it up and out but he didn't know how. In his counseling, he learned that he could write his anger down on a piece of paper and get rid of it that way. After he wrote his anger letter, he had feelings of relief, control, identity, maturity, the power of choice, trust in his judgment, equality, belonging, security and peace of mind. These are all components of self-respect. He was beginning the process of replacing his childhood self-contempt with the feeling that he was a worthwhile human being in spite of his faults and imperfections. No one could give it to him. He had given it to himself. He earned it. What could be fairer than that?

Aaron Karmin is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor (LCPC) in the state of Illinois and has been practicing psychotherapy for 10years. Aaron recognizes the need for flexibility and creativity to address the mind and body. He attended the State University of New York at Stony Brook and received a B.A. in Psychology and Sociology. He then earned his M.A. in Clinical Professional Psychology, received his certification in clinical hypnotherapy and has obtained an advanced certification in stress management. He is a highly effective guest lecturer, group therapy leader, and individual therapist who is able to discuss a variety of stress related topics including: Anger Management, Leadership, Relaxation Techniques, Communication Skills, and Goal Setting Strategies. Aaron's approach to anger management focuses on increasing frustration tolerance and impulse control by understanding triggers, identifying physical cues, recognizing thoughts, considering consequences, implementing solutions, choosing behaviors, and promoting expression.