When I was in my freshman year of college, a friend mentioned the arithmetic-geometric mean inequality. I asked, "What's that?"
He replied, "Everyone knows the arithmetic-geometric mean inequality!"
"I don't," I countered, "so not everyone knows it." I asked him to tell me what it was, in case I knew it under another name.
He stated the theorem, but I had never heard of it. It hadn't been taught in my high school math classes, and wasn't among the tricks I learned on my high school math team.
My friend was annoyed with me for being so dumb, and I was ashamed of my ignorance.
"Not all of us went to fancy prep schools," I retorted, trying to remind him of the advantages he had that I didn't.
Despite conversations like that, it took me ages to realize that many of my conflicts with my peers were probably due to class differences.
A colleague and I were discussing the many things going on in our department that I considered to be terribly unfair. She thought that I took them too seriously, and should just let them go.
"Life isn't fair," she declared.
"But shouldn't we try to make it fair?" I replied.
I sat next to that colleague at a colloquium dinner during my first year at Ohio State. I inherited my parents' Depression Era mindset. And I had a rather small salary (while Ohio State had topped the competing offers for the new tenure track hires who were male, they were only willing to match my other offers). I still had the habits of a grad student who had been trying to make ends meet on stipends and fellowships that didn't cover my (rather meager) expenses. So when it came time to order, I looked at the prices and ordered a soup. When it came time to pay, I was told that we were splitting the bill equally. I pointed out that I would have to pay about $30 more than the cost of what I had ordered.
My colleague who didn't care as much as I did about fairness turned to me and said, "No one else minds splitting the bill." To her, $30 was nothing. To me (in the mid-1980s), it was a lot. Feeling ashamed, I shut up and paid.
I still feel shame whenever I think about the arithmetic-geometric mean inequality or that colloquium dinner. Never underestimate the power of shame.
Of course it's true that life isn't fair. But who are the people who can afford to not worry about it? If you grew up knowing that you would always land on your feet, then being treated unfairly now and then might not be so important. But those of us who aspire to a higher socio-economic class than the one we started out in are sometimes afraid that if one thing goes wrong, we'll slip back to where we started, or even lower.
My colleague implicitly assumed that all of us faculty had similar socio-economic backgrounds. But hers was enough higher than mine to cause friction between us. And while she and I ended up in the same economic class, how we feel about things like fairness has a lot to do with where we started.
Bill Clinton won the 1992 Presidential election by repeatedly reminding us that America at its core is the idea that no matter who you are or where you're from, if you work hard and play by the rules, you can fulfill your potential and live the American Dream. This presupposes that we'll be rewarded for playing by the rules, and punished for breaking them. Fixing things when they're not fair allows people who work hard and play by the rules to raise themselves up.