A traveler on a long journey came to a ford.  Due to recent rains, the stream was swollen to a flood.  The traveler was perplexed to know what to do and exercised his mind for a solution.

“It would not be fair,” the traveler reasoned, “for my way to be blocked because of rains outside my control.  And surely the risen waters cannot be very dangerous, as it would be unjust to punish a man with severe injuries or even death merely because he was attempting to make a journey.”

Reasoning thusly, the man plunged into the stream and was drowned.

Moral: consequences do not have to be fair.

Commentary:

In antiquity, it was the custom to write non-authoritative commentaries on fables and such.  Here is my commentary on this one.

Fairness is not justice.  Justice is meaningful choices leading to meaningful outcomes.  That is all.

The clamor for fairness  probably arises from a metastasized belief in equality.  I have reservations about the view that the modern structure of thought is a form of Gnosticism.  But metastasized equality is fundamentally a spiritual principle.  And the idea that spiritual principles are apart from and above reality, and that reality must bow to them, does seem gnostic to me.  (Aside: we sometimes indulge in the same fallacy in the Church.)

Moderns attack Christians because our scriptures talk of hell.  We explain that damnation is not really a punishment.  It is the agency of the sinner effected to bring themselves misery and separation from God.  But they will not understand.  They persist in believing that any eternal consequence must be an arbitrary punishment imposed by  God as an act of will.

And even, though not believing in God themselves, they seem to fundamentally believe that physical and social reality is a punishment or reward imposed by a power.  How else to explain their attacks on women needing to avoid drunken parties to avoid rape–“it isn’t fair to blame the victim”?  Their complaints that it is unjust than men and women have different biologies?  That anyone could be constrained in their choices merely because “they were born that way”?  To complain that some children are better off, not because of their deserts, but because they happened to have parents who read to them?

It is all a wail against reality.  Having killed God, as they believe, they are now trying to remake society into a deity who is “nice.”