Is it "Life" That's Not Fair, or Just Society?

"There is no such thing" Margaret Thatcher famously said of society. She was, of course, wrong--in this as in pretty much every other thing of which I am aware. Yet there is no denying that her perspective is the conventional one--which produces a good deal of muddle in the minds of the conventional. When people speak of "life" the truth is that they really mean the world as it exists around them at that very moment, which for the most part means the social arrangements of that moment, which in their unimaginativeness and ignorance they think of as eternal--as, indeed, simply "life." Society's failings thus become "life's" failings, and a society's unfairness "life's" unfairness, which authority figures, and other similarly callous and stupid persons, delight in tauntingly throwing in the faces of the victims of that unfairness, who are all too often the victims of the personal actions that society put those authority figures into a position to commit.