Saturday 13 April 2013

Compasses know exactly where North lies. Watches can tell the time down to the nanosecond. Why then with all the glorious technology of the 21st century at our disposal, can we not invent a simple device to measure fairness? A portable wrist or pocket machine would be useful, but we would settle for a behemoth. Just something, anything, that confirmed an equitable deal or exposed an injustice when it saw one. With nothing else to go on but what's in your own heart now, you'll have to trust your instincts.
Obedience? Not your style. Acceptance? Only if what you're being asked to accept is acceptable. You are supposed to be good at compromises. You're certainly good at designing them and suggesting them. Not all of these arrangements, though, are quite as fair as you might like to think. But, then, neither are the conditions you are often asked to agree to. You're redressing an imbalance. To do that, you have to lean towards the other side of an unfair argument. But you don't have to go too far.
You know who your friends are. You can recognise your enemies too. Somewhere, though, on the great psychological scale by which we secretly measure all the folk we know, there are grey areas. Folk that we think we like, but we are not sure how we really feel about them. Ones who make us feel uncomfortable, yet who we suspect we might warm to if we tried. Keep away from obvious extremes. Just explore that middle ground. Someone you don't know so well now knows someone who you need to meet.

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