At some point, the focus of justice stopped being land use and became human use. Because our idea of what treating ourselves fairly meant changed. Instead of dowries and duels, now there were personal injury suits and love. And maybe also because, numerically not rationally, there are just so many more poor people now. In a fair world order, numbers don't lie. It's hardwired into our brain, into all brains animal and pumped up with blood, we instinctively feel what is fair and what is not. We let others cover that up with words and money and complicated systems of guilt. But no matter how much soot covered gold we gild it with, the raw reaction remains. It gets sleepy, it gets lazy, and worse it gets hopeless. But it remains. It is there to be played with, diluted, extracted, but never wiped out.
So what should we use to symbolize justice now? Is it the blind woman with the scales, images of money and worth? Or is it an apathetic universe, letting the yarn roll out of his hands and end up where it wants? Instead of two equal weights, two equal bodies both climbing, struggling to get to the top first. It depends on if you think it exists or not, I guess, and if you believe in god. Lots of emotions live in our genetic material, we certainly don't act on most of them (oh but don't you want to?), so is fairness any different? We try hard not to be animals, and how many times does the animal instinct prove true anyway, and in this case the animal instinct being the angelic instinct. Will this one win? More importantly, if this raw reaction didn't exist, if we had no innate concept of fairness, would god exist? No wait, that's the least important thing.
The symbol of justice now is an image of pain, of the way our neurons flash and shake when confronted with personal discomfort.
The seasons are a reflection of natural justice, if justice should mean harmony and predictability. The way the world rotates and tilts, the equanimity of equators and equinoxes. I never understood why hell was the hot one and heaven the cold one. Is it because the notions were born out of desert people, where the mild winter months were a relief, and northern climates were a place of fertility, trees, growth, massive herds of food? If so, how quickly we chose hell as the vacation destinations once we had a little freedom from need.
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