For today’s mailbag, I think I’m going to leave one for tomorrow and answer some of the more fun comments I’ve had. I had this in response to my bit on Fairness:

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewblog.asp?authorid=55121&m=9&y=2007&blogid=24039

“I agree that ‘fairness’ is a hard thing to create, but you seem more than a little hypocritical here. You said before that big ideas are not as important as people. Isn’t ‘fairness’ just another one of those big ideas that get abused?”

Ouch. I have to agree with this, in the end. That is where Big Ideas like Communism ultimately fell down, on what the Big Idea of fairness meant.

Rather than concentrate on the idea, I should have written this from the perspective of the people that make whatever fairness turns out to be. It was what I was hinting at, but I was too stuck on the idea. You have to cut me some slack, however, since it’s a very important idea if you want to have something like civilization developing between people that live very close together.

I will be more artful in the future. I will also be less artful at times, too, so it’s all kind of a crapshoot.