Do you believe that life is, on the whole, fair? That somehow, some way, everyone gets her just desserts? (Is that what you understand 'karma' to mean—"whatever goes around, comes around?")

If so, then you hold a deeply conservative belief! A profoundly anti-compassionate belief too.

John Kennedy had gifted speechwriters.* One of the things written for him was, "We know that life is unfair. . . ." An unremarkable platitude; except that many Americans do not believe that life is unfair, indeed, belief that life is fair is elevated to political ideology, conservatism, and to a tenet of New Age spiritualism.

If life is fair, and everyone, ultimately, gets her just desserts, then it follows, logically, that compassion is unnecessary. Success is the result of hard work, shrewd judgement, and good conduct. By the same token, failure is the inevitable outcome of laziness, feckelssness and bad conduct. The poor, the diseased, the crippled, the failures, the losers, are reaping what they have sowed.

Retail beliefs in reincarnation accomodate this nicely, for, after all, if a person's fate in this life appears unfair, one can conveniently surmise that she must have done something bad in a previous life.

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*JFK was an insignificant leader, as well as a remarkably unpopular, and elitist President, but he did have good writers, and continues to be blessed with devoted apologists and hagiographers