how we humans conned ourselves out of almost everything

How we conned ourselves out of almost everything
We have global communication, global finance, global transportation, global commerce, global war, global weaponry.
In 1998, Bill Gates increased his fortune by US$18 billion. In Burundi, the average income is US$100. In a world where 90% get less than a tenth of the world-average pay per hour, where 50% get less than a hundredth of the world-average pay per hour, it is easy to see that the lowest Burundi pay would be less than US$18 a year. Therefore the global payrange is by a factor of one billion. A pay injustice factor of one billion.
To put it in visual terms. If pay justice was a swimming pool one metre deep, what we have is the water from that pool sucked up in a needle of water going up one million metres, 1000 kilometres. So that 90% of the water is in the thin needle of water, 90% of the water in the pool is drained, and 90% of the depth of the pool is between 10 centimetres and one millimetre.
Someone getting 10% more for the same work would be unjust. Someone getting twice as much for the same work would be very unjust. If someone working beside you doing the same work was getting twice as much, you would be very unhappy. We have people getting a billion times as much, a billionth as much.
All countries have departments of justice. Philosophy has known for millenia that justice is a cause of happiness. James Madison said bluntly that the purpose of government is justice. The saying that no state built on injustice can stand, is at least as old as the Romans. And indeed history knows of no state or empire built on injustice that has survived. Every empire has in the end been built on pay injustice and has fallen. Yet we have conned ourselves into pay injustice with a present factor of one billion.
Which is also an unhappiness factor of one billion. So we have the greatest opportunity for increase of happiness in the history of the world. The opportunity-for-happiness-increase factor is also one billion. As bad as the present reality is, that is how much better it can be.
Pay injustice is theft. Pay injustice is theft of the thing that is most important in people's lives. Pay injustice is theft of the stuff that is good for exchange into millions of good things, including all necessities. So pay injustice generates the most violence. Which causes the unhappiness. Thus we have also a violence factor of one billion. Pay injustice, violence and unhappiness have been growing for millenia.
How have we conned ourselves into so much unhappiness?
For thousands of years, we have been making an error. And many things in our nature buttress this error. If we can conquer this very deeply rooted, very well buttressed error, we can have happiness increase by a factor of one billion.
What are we doing, that is growing such super-astronomical pay injustice, violence and unhappiness?
Everyone is going after more. More money. No one is going after getting out no more than they put in by their work. If money comes our way, if money can be made to come our way, we accept it, with no regard for how much we have contributed to the making of that money by our work creating wealth. The pool of wealth is the sum of the wealth creation by work. If anyone, by any means, takes out more wealth than they put in, others end up getting out less than they put in. If we get a billion dollars, by lottery, inheritance, profit, or whatever, we all accept it. A billion dollars is a license to take out from the pool of wealth a billion dollars of the products of work. Where we have not put in a billion dollars of wealth by our own work, others have put it in, and do not get to take it out. Theft, violence, unhappiness.
Violence will grow even if pay injustice is not growing. The two sides will throw ever more powerful weaponry at each other trying to prevail. And pay injustice is evergrowing. Because money is power to make money. At a modest 5% interest, a billion dollars is extracting $50 million of workproducts every year for no work at all.
The ideal that everyone is thoughtlessly aiming at is maximum money for minimum work. We are grabbing as much of the cake as we can get. This is the socially acceptable norm. This is the socially admirable norm. This is the game in town. It might produce happiness if the 99% of people who end up with less than they put in would take losing gracefully. If the 90% who end up with between a tenth and a thousandth of what they put in would laugh about it. If the 50% of people who end up with between a hundredth and a thousandth of what they put in would be happy about it. But they are also playing the game, which is to get more. Everyone is aiming to get all of the cake, all of the products of work. Which means that everyone else is the enemy of our aim. Having no limit to our goal means having no limit to our warring.
We play the game with a range of intensity and energy. Some of us, nearly all of us, play the game to an extent, and then depart to the sidelines to enjoy the cake we have got hold of. But we all allow the game. And the game can spill over into the sidelines. The violence is ever-increasing, the violence is as mobile as people, the violence gets into wherever people get to. In the last 50 years, we have gone from being able to destroy a city, a dot on the globe, to being able to destroy all planet life. 60 times over. We see the game, of getting as much as you can, and we see the violence, getting close to the planetary limit, and we do not connect the two. If we can connect the two, we can decide whether we want to stop play.
We can decide whether we want to start trying to play a new game, the game of grabbing all that we have earned, of working out, as well as we can, the amount we have put into the pool and taking out the same. 99% of people would be getting between one and a thousand times as much out. Power would be far more equally distributed, and so democracy and freedom would be near-maximal. Every family working average hard puts in about US$75,000 a year by their work, so every family working average hard would be getting out about US$75,000 a year. Which would mean a far more vigorous economy, far more spending, far more employment, far more successful businesses, far more scientists, far faster progress, far less waste on war and crime, far greater stability, far fewer problems, a human environment far more free of violence pollution.
Do we want to change the game? Some people like going to war, for the booty, for the chance of winning, for killing. A lot of people like the cut and thrust of the game of grab-all, grab-as-much-as-you-can, and can avoid connecting the game to the violence. If they connect the game and the violence, they can put their hopes in avoiding the violence. Most of us find it easy to disbelieve in global extinction by nuclear winter. Most of us believe in the localisation of war, the avoidability of war and other violence. The hostage-killing won't happen when we are visiting the embassy, won't happen in our bank, on our flight. The suicide bomber won't visit our cafe, our bus, our street. Even people in Beirut can believe this. If we want to change the game, we will. If we don't want to, we won't.
If we want to change the game, it is easy to do so. Increasing the money supply by 1% a month and putting the increase equally into all accounts will gently decrease the overfortunes and increase the underfortunes. Will lessen the pressure of the strangulation of the economy. Will start to lift the global extreme fiscal depression. Making inheritance public instead of private will mean the 90% of world income that is now up the needle will shower down on everyone, over the next few generations, putting out the fires of starvation, terrorism and war. It will reverse the endless concentration of wealth which spells the destruction of all states. It will restore the dream of freedom from tyranny and warmongering. The swimming pool will fill again, and everyone can get on with playing happily together again. Super-giga-astronomical unhappiness will change to super-giggle-astronomical happiness. If we want it.
Wanting it requires unlearning all we 'know' in the present game. We have a whole library of beliefs which keeps us believing in the present game. The present game puts out a constant propaganda on what is truth, and we have been listening to this for thousands of years, so that the real truth, the truth that agrees with our own good sense, seems nonsense.
Our own good sense tells us that paying people for the gifts that mother nature has given them is paying people for nothing they have done. But for thousands of years we have listened to the voice of the game which says that getting paid for nature's gifts is one way to play the game of grab-all. And the fact that the net result is that 99% of people are financing this pay to individuals for nothing they have done is hardly allowed to be heard by us. Almost all of us are keen to exploit any gift we have, although only 1% benefit financially from this error, and although 100% of us are embroiled in infinitely mobile, super-penetrating violence, on the brink of atomic extinction, from this and other errors.
In business, we strive to maximise the gap between costs and price. The costs are the work efforts that go into the products. The price is the license to take out of the pool of workproducts. In other words, we try to be as unfair as possible, to grab as much as we can. We sometimes deplore others' great success at doing this, but we do it ourselves. Again, the fact that the net effect is that 99% lose financially, and 100% are embroiled in violence which is now approaching its planetary limit, does not deter us.
A person can legally buy land, wait while others build a city around it, or increase the infrastructure around it, making the land more valuable, and then collect the workproducts of others via the increase of value of the land, and, although our own good sense can see that this is money for nothing for the landowners, meaning nothing for work for others, meaning growing violence and unhappiness for all, we support or do not oppose this, for we are playing the game and hope to profit from that form of grabbing too.
The longterm, very steady increase of value of the stockmarket, which is a reflection of the constant growth of social infrastructure, which is produced by the whole body of workers, is netted by the 10% or so who have shares, and is netted in proportion to the amount of shares people have, and yet we do not oppose this legal theft and injustice, for we are playing the game too.
We feel a kind of justice in everyone's equal right to grab as much as they can, and so we bear the super-extreme injustice, violence and unhappiness fruits of this.
We know individuals are netting up to US$100 million per day, and this only excites us and spurs us to try to do the same. The less some have, and the more others have, both these things spur us to ambition and grab-all. The game is exciting, the game draws us in, the game is inherently self-accelerating. As for some football fans, the game becomes life, and they are excited to the point of killing. When football fans reach this stage, they are reined in, and perhaps spend their lives in jail. But the raid-the-money-pool game is too big for the police to control. The money game is all over the human race. The landlords oppress the peasants, may I be a landlord, is the universal cry. Is there enough will, enough sanity, enough lack of excitement to madness, to rein in the money game? For thousands of years, there has not been enough will. And now the game has accelerated itself to the highest degree of excitement to madness. And now weaponry can freeze everything.
There is payment for scarcity in our system. The banana crop fails in Australia, imports are forbidden, to protect the industry, and prices go through the roof. Payment for absence of bananas. Licenses to take from the pool of workproducts in return for absence of bananas. The grain crop fails, imports are refused, license to take out for not putting in. Subsidies are paid to farmers to not grow, in order to raise prices relative to the work done. The coffee crop in Brazil fails, and Brazil reaps a bonus. The rich close the country, grab up the rural land, force off the poor, the poor are forced into the cities, making labour cheap, making the poor put in far more than they take out. New technology is at first scarce, and so the owners take out billions in return for the scarcity of supply. They do not, as some people think, take out so much because they gave so much. What they take out is the difference between what they put in and what they take out. The price of computers comes down as more firms enter the field, and as supply meets demand, and this shows that the costs are low. If the early high price of new technology was because of development costs, there would be no big profits, there would be no IT millionaires and billionaires.
People are convinced that people should be paid for having qualifications. And many get qualifications in order to reap the legal right to take out more. But once a person is paid for studying, there is no reason in sense to pay them more for having studied. And all students are paid, for they do not live on air. Once students are fully and fairly paid for studying, there is no more reason, in sense, to pay them for having studied than there is reason to pay anyone more for having worked before. But people will be convinced that this sense is nonsense simply on the non-sensical basis that such sense is not the social norm. But then happiness is not the social norm either. We cannot assume that what we have been doing is sense. The argument in everyone's mind is that they have suffered studying, and they intend to be compensated for it as well as they can be, without limit. Without regard for the reality that taking out more than they put in means universal violence, accelerating. Means a 99% chance of being underpaid. Means a 1% chance of being immersed in an environment of 99% underpaid.
There are many reasons given to justify higher-than-average pay per unit of work. Gifts of nature, business risk, responsibility, experience, skill, qualifications, and so on. And these reasons are supported by everyone because everyone thinks they will profit from them. And the perfect unsoundness of these reasons is very hard for people to hear, to listen to and take in. Instead, 99% lose financially by them, and the 1% who gain financially lose by loss of environment. Everyone loses where it counts, in happiness. Obviously, you can make a community in which everyone works miserable simply by giving all the workproducts to one person. Everyone knows that maximal inequality, one person having everything, would be miserable, and yet we have 1% with 90% of world income, and no one can see what that means, and it is very hard for people to see it. The game blinds.
We want to pay people for experience, but experience is gained on the job, at no cost. But the weight of sense is a feather in the wind of the super-excitement of the game. We refuse to take in any sense that contradicts the game.
We accept the limitless payment of people for business risk, but business risk is risking a sprat to catch a mackerel for himself. There is no more sense in it than in paying the fisherman for risking his bait. And there is no way of measuring risk, nor of determining the proper payment per unit of risk if we could measure it. And we would have to start paying everyone for their risks.
So we are drowned in senseless beliefs, and senseless acts, thanks to the game. We have lost all respect for sense, and we have been so long divorced from sense, that sense is so strange to us that we cannot believe it can be true when we meet it. We judge sense by familiarity, as though the familiar has never been wrong.
Everyone knows the connection between pay injustice and violence, because everyone knows that violence and unhappiness would increase massively if a government committed the super-extreme injustice of taking 90% of income permanently off 90% of the population and giving it all to 1%. And everyone knows that violence and unhappiness would decrease equally massively if the government stopped doing this.
We have far greater pay injustice than this.
Would it be a bad thing if all the wealth in the world were redistributed equally among all? It would not be perfectly just, but it would be very, very good for every human being. Everyone's environment would be hugely better. Everyone's future would be hugely brighter. The swimming pool would be fun for all. Humanity would be united. Could love itself again. And humanity is perfectly free to do it. Where there is a will, there is a way. And yet, it seems unlikely that we will do it. It seems we will have contempt for anyone who tries to make us disloyal to the game.
What if the rich started confessing that wealth is useless for happiness, that wealth is bad for happiness? Fairpay buys all necessities, all major desires, and millions of smaller and smaller desires. There just isn't very much desire left for wealth to satisfy. There are only the very smallest, most marginal desires left to satisfy. And meanwhile, the danger of being wealthy amid poverty is extreme, and often fatal. The spots on the earth where you feel safe are very tiny. The Rockefellers behind electric fences, the queen in her palace, special secret places in the Bahamas, Stalin in his room in the Kremlin, penthouses with private lifts, limousines with bombproof floors, command centres deep in mountains. Ceausescu, Caesar, Hitler, Charles I, Marie Antoinette.
What do we want? What is our will?