The world is not governed by justice, and knowing this will set you free

By Horace Palacio:

There is a belief installed in most of us before we can walk, and it runs so deep we mistake it for the law of gravity.

The belief that the world is fair. That justice governs events. That good is rewarded, evil is punished, and everyone eventually gets what they deserve.

It is a beautiful belief. And it is false. Let me make the case, then show you why accepting this hard truth is not despair. It is the beginning of power.

Open history. Idi Amin killed on a scale that numbs the mind, and died peacefully in luxury exile, untried, in a comfortable bed. Meanwhile the century’s gentlest souls were jailed, shot and forgotten. If justice governed the world, those obituaries would read in reverse.

Come closer to home. When Britain abolished slavery, its parliament awarded twenty million pounds in compensation. To whom? To the slaveholders, including those of British Honduras, for the loss of their property. The men and women who had been the property received nothing. Not an acre, not a shilling. And the debt borrowed to pay the owners was serviced into the twenty-first century. At history’s clearest moral reckoning, the ledger paid the wrong side, in full, with interest. Justice did not govern that transaction. Power did. Power always had the pen.

Come closer still. The officers who exposed the SmartStream payments work under threat of investigation while what they exposed idles on paid leave. The mother who never missed a shift counts a 975 dollar month while contracts split themselves politely under thresholds. And the lottery of birth hands one baby Oslo and another the Southside before either has done a single deserving thing.

Even scripture refuses to flatter us here. The race is not to the swift, says Ecclesiastes, but time and chance happen to them all. Job, the most righteous man in his story, suffers everything. The rain, said Jesus, falls on the just and the unjust alike. The Book never promised a karma vending machine. It commanded the faithful, in Micah’s words, to do justice, precisely because it does not do itself.

So why do we cling to the fairy tale? Psychologists call it the just-world belief, and their cruelest finding is this. To protect the comfortable idea that the world is fair, people attack the victim instead of the belief. She provoked it. They brought it on themselves. Listen to Belizean conversation for one day and count how often that knife appears. Our unexamined belief in fairness makes us unfair.

Worse, it sedates us. If the universe punishes the wicked automatically, I need do nothing. My friends, I have checked five thousand years of records. What goes around comes around only when somebody organizes the coming around. The universe employs no police force. Karma has never audited a contract. And the extractors do not share our illusion. Their entire advantage is that we keep expecting the world to be fair while they keep working it as it is.

Now the turn. If justice does not govern the world, then justice is not a law of nature. It is infrastructure. Like a road or a grid, it exists only where people built it and only while people maintain it. Abolition was not gravity, it was fought for. The vote, the free press, this country’s independence, every fair thing you ever benefited from was installed by somebody who stopped waiting. That is why this column bangs on about portals, whistleblower laws and scorecards. A fair society is not found. It is manufactured, plank by plank, and the factory never closes.

And in your own life, stop treating deserving as a strategy. Negotiate. Document. Show up. Then be a place where the rule breaks, every fair wage paid, every bribe refused, every truth published.

In a self-balancing universe, good people could retire.

In this one, they are the load-bearing walls.

The world is governed by whoever shows up. Let it be us.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, Horace Palacio, and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial stance of Breaking Belize News.

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